Denial in DTNs

Disruption-tolerant network (DTN) is an intermittently connected network where the traditional end-to-end data communication between a source-destination pair is hardly possible. Instead, nodes opportunistically replicate the same packet several times and try to deliver them through multiple paths. Due to this multi-copy forwarding scheme, denial of service (DoS) attacks in DTN is believed to be a non-trivial task. Unlike classical DoS attacks for the Internet where an attacker renders some service at a particular node unavailable for legitimate users, in DTN, attackers do not have any node-level attack objective. They rather seek to diminish some network-wide global performance (e.g., total packet delivery). In this report, we describe a few possible DoS attacks for DTNs and propose a set of handful countermeasures against those attacks under the assumptions of our threat model. We show that in the presence of adversaries network performance declines and our protection mechanisms attempt to limit the overall effect to a considerable amount. We simulate our scheme in ns-2 and show that significant tradeoff exists in choosing protection mechanisms commensurately with attack models and resource utilization.