Identifying Pollution Attackers in Network-Coding Enabled Wireless Mesh Networks

Pollution attack is a severe security problem in network-coding enabled wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Under such form of attack, malicious nodes can easily create an epidemic spreading of polluted packets to deplete network resources. We address this security problem even when the attackers are "intelligent" in the sense that they may pretend to be legitimate nodes to probabilistically transmit valid packets so as to reduce the chance of being detected. We use the batch verification technique to determine the existence of polluted packets, and propose fully "distributed" and "randomized" detection algorithms to identify the attackers who inject polluted packets, and purge them for future communication. Formal analysis is provided to quantify performance measures of the algorithms, e.g., probability of false positive and probability of false negative, as well as the probability distribution of time needed to identify all malicious nodes. Simulation and system prototype are carried out to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the detection algorithms.