Towards Assessing the Resilience of Ad-hoc Proactive Routing Protocols
against Dataflow Disruption Attacks
Abstract
1Ad-hoc networks exploit the processing and wirelesscommunication capabilities of mobile devices to createspontaneous and low-cost self-configuring networks. Thedependable use of such networks claims for newmethodologies to evaluate their resilience in thepresence of faults. This paper studies the impact of dataflow disruption attacks on routing protocols of ad-hocnetworks. This impact is characterised throughexperimental estimators of the availability and theintegrity of ad-hoc network routes. A standard proactivead-hoc routing protocol, named OLSR (optimized linkstaterouting protocol), is considered as experimentaltarget. Conversely to existing results in the domain,measures reported in this paper are obtained from a real(non-simulated) ad-hoc network. In the experimentalsetup, only mobility of nodes is simulated. As intuitionstates, our results show that as nodes increase theirmobility, OLSR-based ad-hoc networks increase theirrobustness against data flow disruption attacks. Thisdefines a first effort towards the provision of a generalapproach to audit the security of ad-hoc networks.
1. Introduction
Ad-hoc networks are wireless, self-configuring andself-maintenaning networks that allow dispensing offixed infrastructures. They rely on nodes cooperation forproviding packet routing. This networking technologypresents a great potential in application domains whereinfrastructure deployment is expensive or not possible,like battlefield environments [1], transportation [2] orambient intelligence scenarios [3].Cornerstones of ad hoc networks are routingprotocols. These protocols are specifically designed topromote dissemination of routing information amongnetwork nodes. The goal is to allow the creation ofcommunication links between any two network nodes.The Mobile Ad-hoc Network working group of theInternet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have specified several routing protocols for ad-hoc wireless networks[4]. Attending to the method followed to establishcommunication routes, routing protocols can be reactiveand proactive. Reactive routing protocols find a route ondemand by flooding the network with Route Requestpackets. Conversely, proactive routing protocolsmaintain fresh lists of destinations and their routes byperiodically distributing routing tables.Ad-hoc routing protocols encompass a multitude ofsecurity vulnerabilities that are vastly different fromtheir traditional wired counterparts. Their lack ofinfrastructure, dynamic topology, and openness ofwireless links are responsible for this situation. Attacksagainst routing protocols basically follow themanipulation of the sensitive information exchangedamong nodes to establish communication routes [5].Accordingly, adversaries may inject erroneous routinginformation, replay old routing information, or distortrouting information. These actions may partition thenetwork or introduce a certain traffic overload, thuscausing retransmission and inefficient routing. Theprovision of practical approaches to evaluate the impactof attacks on real ad-hoc routing protocols remains anopen challenge today.This paper addresses that problem. It proposes amethodology to characterise the resilience of ad-hocrouting protocols in presence of data flow disruptionattacks. These attacks target the communication routesof the network. If succeeded, intruders gain control overthe traffic traversing such routes and are able tomanipulate it. The reminder of this publication isorganized as follows. Section 2 presents basic conceptsand states the context of this research. Section 3 defineshow to provide an experimental estimation of theavailability and integrity of network routes. Section 4describes the case study and provides some of theobtained results. Section 5 concludes the paper andestablishes future work directions.


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