Anonymous Secure Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Although there are a large number of papers on secure routing in mobile ad-hoc networks, only a few consider the anonymity issue. In this paper, we define more strict requirements on the anonymity and security properties of the routing protocol, and notice that previous research works only provide Weak Location Privacy and Route Anonymity, and are vulnerable to specific attacks. Therefore, we propose the Anonymous Secure Routing (ASR) protocol that can provide additional properties on anonymity, i.e. Identity Anonymity and Strong Location Privacy, and at the same time ensure the security of discovered routes against various passive and active attacks. Detailed analysis shows that, ASR can achieve both anonymity and security properties, as defined in the requirements, of the routing protocol in mobile ad-hoc networks

ANONYMOUS SECURE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR INTER DOMAIN MANETS

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are vulnerable to security threats due to the inherent characteristics of such networks. It is difficult to provide trusted and secure communications in adversarial environments. In MANETs there is a need of a anonymous communication that can be described as a combination of unidentifiability and unlinkability. Although a number of anonymous secure routing protocols have been proposed, the requirements are not fully satisfied. The existing protocol are vulnerable to fake routing packets or Denial of Service(DOS) broadcasting. The new Protocol Authenticated Anonymous Secure Routing (AASR), focus on the MANETs in adversarial environments. It adopt a key encryption onion to record a discovered route and it uses group signature to authenticate the RREQ packet per hop, to prevent intermediate nodes from modifying the routing packets. In this paper, we provide  Anonymous Secure Routing Protocol for Inter Domain MANETs

A novel solution for achieving anonymity in wireless ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network consists of mobile nodes that can move freely in an open environment. Communicating nodes in a wireless and mobile ad hoc network usually seek the help of other intermediate nodes to establish communication channels. In such an open environment, malicious intermediate nodes can be a threat to the security and/or anonymity of the exchanged data between the mobile nodes. While data encryption can protect the content exchanged between nodes, routing information may reveal valuable information about end users and their relationships. The main purposes of this paper are to study the possibility of achieving anonymity in ad hoc networks, and propose an anonymous routing protocol, similar to onion routing concept used in wired networks. Our protocol includes a mechanism to establish a trust among mobile nodes while avoiding untrustworthy nodes during the route discovery process. The major objective of our protocol is to allow only trustworthy intermediate nodes to participate in the routing protocol without jeopardizing the anonymity of the communicating nodes. We present our scheme, and report on its performance using an extensive set of simulation set of experiments using ns-2 simulator. Our results indicate clearly that anonymity can be achieved in mobile ad hoc networks, and the additional overhead of our scheme to DSR is reasonably low when compared to a non-secure DSR ad hoc routing protocol

A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

Secure Anonymous Routing for MANETs Using Distributed Dynamic Random Path Selection

Most of the MANET security research has so far focused on providing routing security and confidentiality to the data packets, but less has been done to ensure privacy and anonymity of the communicating entities. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol which ensures anonymity, privacy of the user. This is achieved by randomly selecting next hop at each intermediate. This protocol also provides data security using public key ciphers. The protocol is simulated using in-house simulator written in C with OpenSSL crypto APIs. The robustness of our protocol is evaluated against known security attacks

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio