Epidemic Oracle: an approach to boost security and performance of delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) play a vital role in disaster response to address intermittent connectivity, in particular when Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to relay critical information. However, most existing DTN protocols are highly susceptible to Denial-of-Service (DoS)attacks because their flooding-based or simplistic routing decisions can be exploited by malicious nodes to quickly saturate buffers, exhausting network resources and disrupting legitimate traffic. This paper presents an Epidemic Oracle (EO) implementation, to mitigate DoS threats by intelligently removing delivered messages from all buffers, thus reducing overhead and freeing network resources. Through extensive simulation in the ONE environment, EO is evaluated against three established encounter-based DTN protocols-Epidemic, Spray and Wait, and Spray and Wait Binary-under varying buffer sizes, transmission speeds, and both aggressive and stealthy DoS attacks. The findings indicate that EO substantially increases delivery ratios while curtailing buffer congestion, even under severe adversarial conditions. These improvements highlight the potential of oracle-based interventions to bolster performance in UAV-assisted disaster scenarios, paving the way for more resilient and efficient DTNs in emergency communications.