Chapter 9

Opportunistic Routing Security

In this chapter, we identify several security attacks on opportunistic routing and propose countermeasures. The first security vulnerability we identify is the attack on link-quality measurement. In this attack, malicious attackers lie on the measured link quality (i.e. packet reception ratio), in order to disturb the routing decision of link-state-based routing protocols (including traditional and opportunistic routing). We demonstrate the performance degradation of the traditional and opportunistic routing under this type of attack. We find that opportunistic routing is more resilient to link quality bluffing attack than traditional single path routing. We then propose an efficient broadcast-based secure link quality measurement (SLQM) mechanism, which prevents the malicious attacker from reporting a higher packet reception ratio than the actual one. We also identify several attacks on the current opportunistic routing MAC protocols and discuss possible countermeasures to these attacks. Finally, we evaluate the resilience of opportunistic routing to packet dropping attacks. We find that in some scenarios, opportunistic routing is more vulnerable to packet dropping attacks than traditional routing when the attackers are randomly distributed in the network. However, in the scenario when an attacker is on the path of the traditional routing, no packets can be delivered whereas in this scenario, opportunistic routing can still deliver a portion of packets owing to its multipath nature.