An Energy-Efficient Technique to Combat DOS Attacks in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTN) are highly constrained networking environments low in resources such as memory, bandwidth, battery and processing power. In opportunistic DTNs, nodes cooperatively forward packets for each other through the carry-store-and-forward paradigm. Opportunistic data forwarding can be abused by an adversary by injecting bogus packets in order to waste the resources of the network. To guard against such attacks, it is important to authenticate packets at intermediate nodes. Packet authentication in itself comes with overheads such as computation cost and energy consumption which can be exploited by an attacker to mount denial of service (DOS) attacks. We propose the use of light-weight DTN-cookies to protect this vital security service from such malicious exploitation.