An Analysis of Routing Disruption Attack on Dynamic Source Routing Protocol

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of routing disruption attacks on the DSR protocol in ad hoc networks, revealing severe effects under certain conditions and suggesting potential performance improvements.

Contribution

It introduces a probabilistic attack model on DSR and analyzes its effects, highlighting both vulnerabilities and possible enhancements.

Findings

Attack causes catastrophic performance degradation with many compromised nodes

Detection mechanisms can mitigate attack effects

Attack model can be used to improve DSR performance

Abstract

Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) is a well known source routing protocol for ad hoc networks. The algorithm depends on the cooperative participation of the nodes that enables route discovery from a source node to a destination node. However, if a group of nodes do not cooperate, the performance of the DSR protocol may be severely degraded. This paper presents a probabilistic attack model on the DSR protocol and analyses its effect on the routing performance. Simulations results of the model show that the effect of the attack is catastrophic only if a large number of nodes are compromised and there is no detection mechanism. As an interesting observation, the analysis also shows that the attack model can also be used to improve the performance of the DSR protocol.