Evaluating Network Boolean Tomography under Byzantine Attacks

It is vital to closely track the operation statuses of network-internal links. Accurate knowledge of the operation statuses of network-internal links is vital for the management of many networks like the Internet, the satellite communication network, etc. Network boolean tomography can identify congested links just using end-to-end path status observations, and is able to work efficiently even without any available cooperation of internal nodes. Nevertheless, it heavily assumes that all the path status observations collected are true while some Byzantine attacks, e.g., the label flip attacks, could violate this assumption. In this paper, we present a performance evaluation of network boolean tomography under Byzantine attacks. Our results against various attacking rates, locations, and scales all show that Byzantine attacks could cause a significant performance degradation of network boolean tomography, suggesting a pressing need of developing the detection and countermeasure techniques.