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Goal: Defend pair-wise communication channels in MANETs
Question: How do we protect against black-hole routers, man-in-the-middle attacks, and Byzantine and geographically localized failures?
Solution: Electric-field-based routing (EFR), inspired by nature’s way of forming electric field lines
• Locally apply electric-field equations at each node
• Globally define spatially
disjoint routes for
communicating pairs
• No further route coordination +
Abstract
Electric-Field-Based Routing (EFR) is designed to defend pair-wise communication channels in MANETs. In particular,
EFR is resilient to black-hole routers, man-in-the-middle attacks, and Byzantine and geographically localized failures.
EFR is inspired by nature’s way of forming electric field lines.
By locally applying electric-field equations at each node, we can globally define a family of spatially disjoint routes (similar to the shapes of field lines) for
communicating pairs. This insight allows a source-destination pair (assigned with opposite polarities) to reconfigure routes and route memberships constantly and rapidly
, thus making mobility and failures the common case.
An EFR node uses its position relative to the source and destination to compute the forwarding hops, based on the electric-field equation. Since a node determines its route membership at packet arrival times and maintains no route states, route constructions require no coordination among routes. Globally, given an adequate node density, packets sent in distinct directions will reach the destination through spatially disjoint paths.
EFR provides the following benefits: (1) Spatially disjoint and redundant paths protect against geographically localized failures, Byzantine failures, and associated service degradation. (2) EFR can apply threshold-based cryptography to communicate in the presence of broken routes and intercepts packets. (3) EFR can detect data integrity breaches with redundant information transmitted along multiple paths. (4) EFR is resilient to black-hole routers because the forwarding node selection is based on the context of a node relative to field lines.
Rapid reconfiguration regardless of failures and mobility
• Disjointness of routes easily configurable by initial send angles
• Route memberships decided at packet arrival times min(

) Different angled routes
Source
Destination
Next hop min(D) Field line
Current node
Ideal next hop
Transmission range
• No maintenance of route participation
• Constantly and rapidly changing route memberships
• Failures and mobility as the common case
Defense against black-hole routers: The next hop selection Defense against geographically localized and Byzantine is based on the context of a node relative to field lines. A router failures: Routes are spatially disjoint even near both source cannot claim to be the ideal next hop for all nodes. and destination.
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Defense against integrity breaches: Redundant information can be sent through redundant routes to detect data integrity breaches.
Defense against multiple interceptions: Use thresholdbased cryptography to reconstruct encrypted data in the presence of failures.
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