An Iterative Algorithm for Trust Management and Adversary Detection for Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have been identified as one of the key areas in the field of wireless communication, wherein sparseness and delay are particularly high. They are emerging as a promising technology in vehicular, planetary/interplanetary, military/tactical, disaster response, underwater and satellite networks. DTNs are characterized by large end-to-end communication latency and the lack of end-to-end path from a source to its destination. These characteristics pose several challenges to the security of DTNs. Especially, Byzantine attacks in which one or more legitimate nodes have been compromised and fully controlled by the adversary can give serious damages to the network in terms of latency and data availability. Using reputation-based trust management systems is shown to be an effective way to handle the adversarial behavior in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). However, because of the unique characteristics of DTNs, those traditional techniques do not apply to DTNs. Our main objective in this paper is to develop a robust trust mechanism and an efficient and low cost malicious node detection technique for DTNs. Inspired by our recent results on reputation management for online systems and e-commerce, we develop an iterative malicious node detection mechanism for DTNs referred as ITRM. The proposed scheme is a graph-based iterative algorithm motivated by the prior success of message passing techniques for decoding low-density parity-check codes over bipartite graphs. Applying ITRM to DTNs for various mobility models, we observed that the proposed iterative reputation management scheme is far more effective than well-known reputation management techniques such as the Bayesian framework and EigenTrust. Further, we concluded that the proposed scheme provides high data availability and packet-delivery ratio with low latency in DTNs under various adversary attacks which attempt to both undermine the trust and detection scheme and the packet delivery protocol.