In novel forms of the Social Internet of Things, any mobile user within communication range may help routing messages for another user in the network. The resulting message delivery rate depends both on the users' mobility patterns and the message load in the network. This new type of configuration, however, poses new challenges to security, amongst them, assessing the effect that a group of colluding malicious participants can have on the global message delivery rate in such a network is far from trivial. In this work, after modeling such a question as an optimization problem, we are able to find quite interesting results by coupling a network simulator with an evolutionary algorithm. The chosen algorithm is specifically designed to solve problems whose solutions can be decomposed into parts sharing the same structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on two medium-sized Delay-Tolerant Networks, realistically simulated in the urban contexts of two cities with very different route topology: Venice and San Francisco. In all experiments, our methodology produces attack patterns that greatly lower network performance with respect to previous studies on the subject, as the evolutionary core is able to exploit the specific weaknesses of each target configuration.

This paper presents a genotype-level distance metric for Genetic Programming (GP) based on the symmetric difference concept: first, the information contained in individuals is expressed as a set of symbols (the content of each node, its position inside the tree, and recurring parent-child structures); then, the difference between two individuals is computed considering the number of elements belonging to one, but not both, of their symbol sets.

Defining a distance measure over the individuals in the population of an Evolutionary Algorithm can be exploited for several applications, ranging from diversity preservation to balancing exploration and exploitation. When individuals are encoded as strings of bits or sets of real values, computing the distance between any two can be a straightforward process; when individuals are represented as trees or linear graphs, however, quite often the user must resort to phenotype-level problem-specific distance metrics. This paper presents a generic genotype-level distance metric for Linear Genetic Programming: the information contained by an individual is represented as a set of symbols, using ngrams to capture significant recurring structures inside the genome. The difference in information between two individuals is evaluated resorting to a symmetric difference. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed metric has a strong correlation with phenotype-level problem-specific distance measures in two problems where individuals represent string of bits and Assembly-language programs, respectively.

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