A Routing Table Poisoning Model for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Botnets

Abstract

Due to the global increase in mobile devices and cellular networks such as 3G, 4G, or LTE-A networks, the concept of the interpenetration of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks in cellular environments has gained immense popularity among mobile users. P2P networks allow users to share their computing resources efficiently with the advantages of fault tolerance, robust connectivity, load balancing, and easy maintenance. The ability of a peer to connect to another peer depends on the distinguishing features of the overlay networks. For connection, network routing tables are maintained by each peer in the network to construct the P2P overlay on the Internet. This construction renders the P2P networks vulnerable to the existing attacks using the Internet. Some of these attack models have been proposed in the past using botnets. However, models using botnets do not accommodate the advanced attacks that can infect the majority of the entries in the routing table. In this paper, we propose a model to analyze the impacts of routing table poisoning attacks on the P2P botnet (rBot) architecture. We present the security analysis of the proposed epidemic model for state-of-the-art rBots. The obtained results were effective for attacks on the unstructured P2P static and mobile environments.