An Approach for Black-hole Attack Mitigation in Disruption-tolerant Ad-hoc Smartphone Networks
Manuel Weißbach, Marius Feldmann · 2018
When cellular networks collapse (e.g. due to disaster scenarios), it is vital to quickly establish new communication channels. The worldwide spread of smartphones, which support multiple communication standards, offers a great potential to solve this problem with commodity hardware. On the software side, Disruption-tolerant Network technologies may be leveraged to transmit messages between devices, even if there is no direct connection between them. However, DTNs are vulnerable to black-hole attacks. Therefore, mechanisms have to be available to address this problem in order to provide reliable networks. In this paper, we present a concept for an ad-hoc smartphone-based DTN which is robust against packet drop attacks as network nodes are able to identify attackers and exclude them from the network. The overall concept has been practically evaluated using an implementation for the Android platform. Our results show that the approach is capable to mitigate black-hole attacks effectively with high detection rate and short convergency time.