A DOS-resilient design for delay tolerant networks

Packet injection by an attacker can trigger flooding-based DOS attacks. This paper seeks to provide a simple and robust approach to protect the access control, data integrity and sender authentication security services in resource-constrained delay tolerant networks. The aim is to make security protocols providing these mandatory security services resilient to resource exhaustion DOS attacks. To achieve this we propose a hierarchical design based on the use of light-weight and hard to forge cookies. The DOS defense mechanism can proactively identify and discard attack bundles. Compromised insider nodes are identified and isolated.