Title: Mitigating selfish, blackhole and wormhole attacks in DTN in a secure, cooperative way

Authors: Amit Kr. Gupta; Jyotsna Kr. Mandal; Indrajit Bhattacharya

Addresses: Kalyani Government Engineering College, Kalyani, West Bengal, India ' University of Kalyani, Kalyani, West Bengal, India ' Kalyani Government Engineering College, Kalyani, West Bengal, India

Abstract: In this work, security threats posed by selfish, blackhole and wormhole attacks in a delay tolerant network (DTN) are addressed. A cooperative approach has been proposed as a solution where malicious behaviour of a node is tested whenever another node tries to send a message to it. Performance parameters, like received and sent messages to neighbouring nodes have been used along with calculated faith values (CFV) to derive latest CFVs. The process is repeated for each communication instance. In addition, a simple yet efficient credibility-based cryptographic encryption technique is applied to encrypt message contents that works by appending the signatures and CFV values of each encountered nodes. The method has been tested, by implementing it over the spray and wait DTN protocol, in the ONE simulator. The proposed strategy is able to avoid the three types of malicious nodes effectively and increases the trustworthiness of communication process greatly.

Keywords: selfish nodes; delay tolerant networks; DTNs; network security; cooperation; combined faith value; CFV; blackhole attacks; wormhole attacks; cryptography; encryption; trustworthiness.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2017.082843

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2017 Vol.9 No.1/2, pp.130 - 155

Received: 09 Feb 2016
Accepted: 24 Aug 2016
Published online: 13 Mar 2017 *

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