| Abstract | Ad-hoc low-power wireless networks are an
exciting research direction in sensing and pervasive
computing. Prior security work in this area has focused
primarily on denial of communication at the routing or
medium access control levels. This paper explores resource
depletion attacks at the routing protocol layer, which
permanently disable networks by quickly draining nodes’
battery power. These “Vampire” attacks are not specific to
any specific protocol, but rather rely on the properties of
many popular classes of routing protocols. We find that all
examined protocols are susceptible to Vampire attacks,
which are devastating, difficult to detect, and are easy to
carry out using as few as one malicious insider sending
only protocol compliant messages. In the worst case, a
single Vampire can increase network-wide energy usage by
a factor of O (N), wherein the number of network nodes.
We discuss methods to mitigate these types of attacks,
including a new proof-of-concept protocol that provably
bounds the damage caused by Vampires during the packet
forwarding phase.
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