Black Holes and Revelations: Using Evolutionary Algorithms to Uncover Vulnerabilities in Disruption-Tolerant Networks

A challenging aspect in open ad hoc networks is their resilience against malicious agents. This is especially true in complex, urban-scale scenarios where numerous moving agents carry mobile devices that create a peer-to-peer network without authentication. A requirement for the proper functioning of such networks is that all the peers act legitimately, forwarding the needed messages, and concurring to the maintenance of the network connectivity. However, few malicious agents may easily exploit the movement patterns in the network to dramatically reduce its performance. We propose a methodology where an evolutionary algorithm evolves the parameters of different malicious agents, determining their types and mobility patterns in order to minimize the data delivery rate and maximize the latency of communication in the network. As a case study, we consider a fine-grained simulation of a large-scale disruption-tolerant network in the city of Venice. By evolving malicious agents, we uncover situations where even a single attacker can hamper the network performance, and we correlate the performance decay to the number of malicious agents.