International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR)
Abstract
We draw an analogy of \emph{biological cyanide poisoning} to security
attacks in self-organizing mobile ad hoc networks. When a circulatory
system is treated as an enclosed network space, a hemoglobin is treated
as a mobile node, and a hemoglobin binding with cyanide ion is treated
as a compromised node (which cannot bind with oxygen to furnish its
oxygen-transport function), we show how cyanide poisoning can reduce the
probability of oxygen/message delivery to a rigorously defined
``negligible\u27\u27 quantity. Like formal cryptography, security problem in
our network-centric model is defined on the complexity-theoretic concept
of ``negligible\u27\u27, which is asymptotically sub-polynomial with respect
to a pre-defined system parameter x. Intuitively, the parameter x
is the key length n in formal cryptography, but is changed to the
network scale, or the number of network nodes N, in our model. We use
the \RP (n-runs) complexity class with a virtual oracle to formally
model the cyanide poisoning phenomenon and similar network threats.
This new
analytic approach leads to a new view of biological threats from the
perspective of network security and complexity theoretic study