Mitigating Byzantine Attacks in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Attacks where adversaries have full control of a number of authenticated devices and behave arbitrarily to disrupt the network are referred to as Byzantine attacks. Traditional secure routing protocols are vulnerable to this class of attacks since they usually assume that once authenticated, a node can be trusted to execute the protocol correctly. We present a detailed description of several Byzantine attacks (black hole, flood rushing, wormhole and overlay network wormhole), analyze their mechanisms and describe the major mitigation techniques. Through simulation, we perform a quantitative evaluation of the impact of these attacks on an insecure on-demand routing protocol. The relative strength of the attacks is analyzed in terms of the magnitude of disruption caused per adversary. An implementation of the On-Demand Secure Byzantine Routing protocol (ODSBR) was created in order to quantify its ability to mitigate the considered attacks. ODSBR was chosen because its design addresses a wide range of Byzantine attacks.