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Intercepting a Stealthy Network

Published: 12 March 2021 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate an understudied threat: networks of stealthy routers (S-Routers), relaying messages to a hidden destination. The S-Routers relay communication along a path of multiple short-range, low-energy hops, to avoid remote localization by triangulation. Mobile devices called Interceptors can detect communication by an S-Router, but only when the Interceptor is next to the transmitting S-Router. We examine algorithms for a set of mobile Interceptors to find the destination of the communication relayed by the S-Routers. The algorithms are compared according to the number of communicating rounds before the destination is found, i.e., rounds in which data is transmitted from the source to the destination. We evaluate the algorithms analytically and using simulations, including against a parametric, optimized strategy for the S-Routers. Our main result is an Interceptors algorithm that bounds the expected number of communicating rounds by a term quasilinear in the number of S-Routers. For the case where S-Routers transmit at every round (“continuously”), we present an algorithm that improves this bound.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 17, Issue 2
May 2021
296 pages
ISSN:1550-4859
EISSN:1550-4867
DOI:10.1145/3447946
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 12 March 2021
Accepted: 01 October 2020
Revised: 01 August 2020
Received: 01 November 2019
Published in TOSN Volume 17, Issue 2

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