VAMPIRE ATTACKS: DRAINING LIFE FROM WIRELESS AD HOC SENSOR NETWORKS

Ubiquitous on-demand computing power, continuous connectivity, and instantly deployable communication for military and first responders are some of the exciting applications for future technology which securely works in wireless ad hoc Networks. Direction in sensing and pervasive computing is the basic process in which wireless networks works. Wireless ad hoc networks are particularly vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks, and a great deal of research has been done to enhance survivability. Prior security work in this area has focused primarily on denial of communication at the routing or medium access control levels. We consider how routing protocols, even those designed to be secure, lack protection from these attacks, which we call Vampire attacks, since they drain the life from networks nodes. These “Vampire” attacks are not specific to any specific protocol, but rather rely on the properties of many popular classes of routing protocols. We find that all examined protocols are susceptible to Vampire attacks, which are devastating, difficult to detect, and are easy to carry out using as few as one malicious insider sending only protocol-compliant messages. Mitigating these types of attacks, including a new proof-of-concept protocol that provably bounds the damage caused by Vampires during the packet forwarding phase is introduced in this work.