Of Malicious Motes and Suspicious Sensors
How much damage can a malicious tiny device cause in a single-hopwireless network? Imagine two players, Alice and Bob, who want toexchange information. Collin, a malicious adversary, wants to preventthem from communicating. By broadcasting at the same time as Alice orBob, Collin can destroy their messages or overwhelm them with his ownmalicious data. Being a tiny device, however, Collin can onlybroadcast up to B times. Given that Alice and Bob do not knowB, and cannot distinguish honest from malicious messages, howlong can Collin prevent them from communicating? We show the answerto be 2B + Theta(lg|V|) communication rounds, where V is theset of values that Alice and Bob may transmit. We prove this resultto be optimal by deriving an algorithm that matches our lowerbound---even in the stronger case where Alice and Bob do not start thegame at the same time.We then argue that this specific 3-player game captures the generalextent to which a malicious adversary can disrupt coordination in asingle-hop wireless network. We support this claim by deriving---via reduction from the 3-player game---round complexity lower boundsfor several classical n-player problems: 2B + Theta(lg|V|) for reliable broadcast,2B + Omega(lg(n/k)) for leader election among k contenders,and 2B + Omega(k*lg(|V|/k)) for static k-selection. We then consider an extension of our adversary model that also includes up to t crash failures. We study binary consensus as the archetypal problem for this environment and show a bound of 2B + Theta(t) rounds. We conclude by providing tight, or nearly tight, upper bounds for all four problems. The new upper and lower bounds in this paper represent the first such results for a wireless network in which the adversary has the ability to disrupt communication.