Improving the efficiency of anonymous routing for MANETs

Anonymity of mobile devices and their data is an essential requirement to facilitate the deployment of future Mobile Ad hoc Networks. The currently proposed anonymous routing mechanisms for such networks inherently include a trade-off between a high level of anonymity, performance and scalability. In this paper (parts of this paper have been published in TrustCom 2010), we propose an anonymous routing protocol that provides improved anonymity and security while achieving similar or better performance, as compared to existing proposals. Our proposal achieves anonymity using an efficient solution for invisible implicit addressing based on keyed hash chain and security via a novel application of one-to-many Diffie–Hellman mechanism, used to exchange keys for symmetric encryption. The final contribution includes a mechanism to facilitate selection of a trusted route by verifying connections between intermediate nodes. We demonstrate the benefits of our proposal in comparison with previous approaches using analysis and simulation.