Techniques of Intrusion-Resistant Ad Hoc Routing Algorithms (TIARA)

This research effort, funded by DARPA/ATO's Fault Tolerant Networks (FTN) program, developed a ground breaking approach for protecting ad hoc networks against denial of service (DoS) attacks. ATCorp has successfully built and demonstrated a TRL 5 implementation of a TIARA based survivable ad hoc network. DARPA recognized this project with a "bytes-per-buck" award in January 2002.

TIARA is a collection of DoS defense mechanisms that enable ad hoc networks to operate interrupted through two major types of attacks, i.e., packet flooding attacks (or resource depletion attacks) and packet drop attacks (or flow disruption attacks) that may be launched through compromised nodes within the network. Examples of DoD applications that would benefit from TIARA enabled DoS-resistant ad hoc networks include situation awareness systems for maneuvering warfighters, remotely-deployed unmanned micro-sensor networks used for surveillance and reconnaissance, and wireless line-of- sight networks intra-battlegroup communications for the Navy.

The TIARA approach for DoS-resistant ad hoc wireless networks is based on three key innovations:

1. A fully distributed, self configuring wireless firewall mechanism that confines the impact of a packet flooding attack to the immediate neighborhood of the intruder node.
2. Routing algorithm neutral techniques for detecting and recovering from intruder-induced path failures.
3. A wireless router extension (WRE) architecture that enables survivability mechanisms for intruder-induced DoS attacks to be incorporated within existing wireless IP router implementations with little effort.