Attack-Resistant Routing : a Framework for Enhancing Routing Robustness in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Optimizations in wireless ad-hoc network control protocols, such as shortest path routing and reduced topology set operations, are widely employed and recognized to decrease overhead and improve performance in benign conditions. Such optimizations, however, result in vulnerabilities that can decrease the robustness of the network when misconfigured, and can be readily exploited under various adversarial models. In this paper, we study the effects of such optimizations in the presence of misconfiguration and attacks, and we propose an Attack-Resistant Routing (ARR) framework that mitigates adversarial effects. While many other methods of combating certain control plane attacks have been proposed, our method is unique in that it assumes no prior knowledge of the mechanisms used to effect the attacks and the type of misinformation affecting the network. Rather, it alleviates the vulnerabilities introduced by various optimizations, thus increasing network robustness when the network is under attack or misconfigured. We show that ARR can withstand multiple and severe attacks and restore network performance to levels close to normal.