Protecting data flow anonymity in mobile ad hoc networks that employ cooperative caching

Caching systems have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to increase data availability and reduce data access delays. However, such caching systems can expose the identities of the participants and have their interests profiled. In this work, we propose a privacy preserving system for caching systems in MANETs, and consider as a test case a caching architecture that was proposed earlier by one of the authors. The system protects the privacy of the nodes that request data and those that provide it by offering source and destination anonymity, thus hiding their identities from other nodes in the caching paradigm and from the service provider. Our system was implemented using ns-2 and was found to achieve high values of anonymity with mitigated delays and overhead traffic.