Securing Mobile Networks: Identifying Route Hijacking in Opportunistic Scenarios

This paper investigates the security vulnerabilities of Hybrid Routing and Prophet protocols in Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OMNs), highlighting their susceptibility to a novel threat called the CollusiveHijack attack. In this scenario, an adversary—referred to as Eve— compromises multiple nodes and intentionally falsifies Inter-Contact-Time (ICT) data to exaggerate the frequency of node encounters. By misrepresenting these metrics, Eve successfully manipulates routing decisions and intercepts network traffic. This manipulation facilitates more advanced attacks such as traffic eavesdropping, packet tampering, and exploitation of network incentives. To counteract this threat, we introduce a detection framework based on the Kolmogorov- Smirnov two-sample statistical test. This approach examines whether the observed delay distribution of packet delivery aligns with the expected distribution derived from ICTs. We develop three detection strategies—Path Detection Technique (PDT), Hop Detection Technique (HDT), and Early Hop Detection Technique (EHDT)—each balancing between security protocol compatibility, detection effectiveness, and response time. Our evaluation, comprising detailed trace-driven simulations and a prototype implementation, demonstrates the efficacy of these methods. Specifically, the proposed techniques achieve detection rates ranging from 80.0% to 99.4% when Eve captures over 60 packets, with low false positives (~3.6%) and rapid detection times (7–14 hours). The EHDT method, in particular, offers up to 85% faster detection compared to PDT and HDT.