On Secure Multi-Copy Based Routing in Compromised Delay Tolerant Networks

Routing in delay tolerant networks (DTNs) is challenging due to their unique characteristics of intermittent node connectivity. Different protocols (single-copy, multi-copy, erasure-coding-based etc.) utilizing store-carry-and-forward paradigm are proposed to achieve routing of messages in such environments by opportunistic message exchanges between nodes that are in the communication range of each other. The sparsity and distributed nature of these networks together with the lack of stable connectivity between source destination pairs make these networks vulnerable to malicious nodes which might attempt to learn the content of the messages being routed between the nodes. In this paper, we consider DTNs in which malicious nodes are present, to which we refer to as compromised DTNs. We discuss and analyze the effects of presence of malicious nodes in the compromised DTN on routing of messages. We propose a two period routing approach which aims to achieve desired delivery ratio by a given delivery deadline in presence of malicious nodes. Our results show that, with proper parameter setting, the desired delivery ratio by a given delivery deadline can be achieved most of the time by the proposed method.