A metric for adaptive routing on trustworthy paths

Abstract

Any data transmission over multiple hops requires the use of routing algorithms to find a path from the sender to the receiver(s). Supporting secure data transmissions further requires the selected path to be trustworthy, i.e., not under the control of an attacker. Since attacks can occur at any time during data transmission, the current state of the network must be considered when selecting trustworthy paths. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric – called Locally Evaluated Trust (LET) – for local trust evaluation. The LET metric can be used by adaptive routing algorithms to select a trustworthy path. To evaluate our approach, we simulate different routing algorithms and compare their performance in the presence of one or more malicious nodes in a two-dimensional torus mesh. Our results show that the LET metric allows adaptive routing algorithms to effectively identify and circumvent malicious nodes.