Secure Multi-copy 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-, multi-copy, erasure-coding-based etc.) utilizing store-carry-and-forward paradigm have been 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 study 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 on routing of messages in compromised DTNs. We propose a two period routing approach which aims at achieving the desired delivery ratio by a given delivery deadline in presence of malicious nodes. Our simulation results with both random networks and real DTN traces show that, with proper parameter setting, the proposed method can achieve delivery ratios which surpass those reached by other algorithms by a given delivery deadline.