Secure High-Throughput Multicast Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

Recent work in multicast routing for wireless mesh networks has focused on metrics that estimate link quality to maximize throughput. Nodes must collaborate in order to compute the path metric and forward data. The assumption that all nodes are honest and behave correctly during metric computation, propagation, and aggregation, as well as during data forwarding, leads to unexpected consequences in adversarial networks where compromised nodes act maliciously. In this work the authors identify novel attacks against high-throughput multicast protocols in wireless mesh networks. The attacks exploit the local estimation and global aggregation of the metric to allow attackers to attract a large amount of traffic.