Neutralization of errors and attacks in wireless ad hoc networks

This paper proposes and evaluates strategies to build reliable and secure wireless ad hoc networks. Our contribution is based on the notion of inner-circle consistency, where local node interaction is used to neutralize errors/attacks at the source, both preventing errors/attacks from propagating in the network and improving the fidelity of the propagated information. We achieve this goal by combining statistical (a proposed fault-tolerant cluster algorithm) and security (threshold cryptography) techniques with application-aware checks to exploit the data/computation that is partially and naturally replicated in wireless applications. We have prototyped an inner-circle framework with the ns-2 network simulator, and we use it to demonstrate the idea of inner-circle consistency in two significant wireless scenarios: (1) the neutralization of black hole attacks in AODV networks and (2) the neutralization of sensor errors in a target detection/localization application executed over a wireless sensor network.