Stealth attacks on ad-hoc wireless networks

We study two classes of attacks that can be mounted by manipulation of routing information and exhaustive power consumption. Our attacks allow an attacker to partition a network, reduce its goodput, hijack and filter traffic from and to victim nodes, and thereby eavesdrop and perform traffic analysis. The methods described are "stealth attacks" in that they minimize the cost to and visibility of the attacker. We introduce the notion of reputation based control, and suggest that it can be used to augment existing routing protocols in order to immunize these against stealth attacks.