Detecting blackhole attacks in disruption-tolerant networks through packet exchange recording

The Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are especially useful in providing mission critical services such as in emergency networks or battlefield scenarios. However, DTNs are vulnerable to insider attacks, in which the legitimate nodes are compromised and the adversary nodes launch blackhole attacks by dropping packets in the networks. The traditional approaches of securing routing protocols can not address such insider attacks in DTNs. In this paper, we propose a method to secure the history records of packet delivery information at each contact so that other nodes can detect insider attacks by analyzing these packet delivery records. We evaluated our approach through extensive simulations using both Random Way Point and Zebranet mobility models. Our results show that our method can detect insider attacks efficiently with high detection rate and low false positive rate.