In this abstract, we develop an accurate algorithm for detecting selective packet drops made by insider attackers. Our algorithm also provides a truthful and publicly verifiable decision statistics as a proof to support the detection decision. The high detection accuracy is achieved by exploiting the correlations between the positions of lost packets, as calculated from the auto-correlation function (ACF) of the packet-loss bitmap—a bitmap describing the lost/received status of each packet in a sequence of consecutive packet transmissions. The basic idea behind this method is that even though malicious dropping may result in a packet loss rate that is comparable to normal channel losses, the stochastic processes that characterize the two phenomena exhibit different correlation structures (equivalently, different pat-terns of packet losses). Therefore, by detecting the correlations between lost packets, one can decide whether the packet loss is purely due to regular link errors, or is a combined effect of link error and malicious drop. Our algorithm takes into account the cross-statistics between lost packets to make a more informative decision, and thus is in sharp contrast to the conventional methods that rely only on the distribution of the number of lost packets. To improve the detection accuracy, we propose to exploit the correlations between lost packets. Furthermore, to ensure truthful calculation of these correlations, we develop a homomorphic linear authenticator (HLA) based public auditing architecture that allows the detector to verify the truthfulness of the packet loss information reported by nodes. This construction is privacy preserving, collusion proof, and incurs low communication and storage overheads. To reduce the computation overhead of the baseline scheme, a packet-block-based mechanism is also proposed, which allows one to trade detection accuracy for lower computation complexity. Through extensive simulations, we verify that the proposed mechanisms achieve significantly better detection accuracy than conventional methods such as a maximum-likelihood based detection.
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