Trust management and adversary detection for delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have been identified as one of the key areas in the field of wireless communications. They are characterized by large end-to-end communication latency and the lack of end-to-end path from a source to its destination. These characteristics pose several challenges to the security of DTNs. Especially, Byzantine attacks give serious damages to the network in terms of latency and data availability. Using reputation-based trust management systems is shown to be an effective way to handle the adversarial behavior in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs). However, because of the unique characteristics of DTNs, the techniques to build a trust mechanism for MANETs do not apply to DTNs. Our main objective in this paper is to develop a robust trust mechanism and an efficient and low cost malicious node detection technique for DTNs. Inspired by our recent results on reputation management for online systems and e-commerce, we developed an iterative malicious node detection mechanism for DTNs which is far more effective than existing techniques. Our results indicate the proposed scheme provides high data availability and packet-delivery ratio with low latency in DTNs under adversary attacks.