Vulnerability of Network Traffic Under Node Capture Attacks Using Circuit Theoretic Analysis

The authors investigate the impact of node capture attacks on the confidentiality and integrity of network traffic. They map the compromise of network traffic to the flow of current through an electric circuit and propose a metric for quantifying the vulnerability of the traffic using the circuit mapping. They compute the vulnerability metric as a function of the routing and the cryptographic protocols used to secure the network traffic. They formulate the minimum cost node capture attack problem as a nonlinear integer programming problem. Due to the NP-hardness of the minimization problem, they provide a greedy heuristic that approximates the minimum cost attack.