Certificate Free Anonymous Routing for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Amal Banerjee, Christine Julien, Vitaly Shmatikov · 2006
This paper introduces a lightweight, anonymous, and secure routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. It leverages Identity Based Encryption (IBE) to provide a certificate-free key distribution mechanism. IBE is used only in the protocol’s critical initial stage, to exchange cryptographic key material for subsequent operations. This minimizes computational cost and facilitates communication anonymity and data privacy. First and foremost, our protocol provides identity anonymity, which ensures that, although a node might determine that one of its neighbors is sending or receiving data, it is unable to pin-point the identity of that neighbor. Our protocol also provides route anonymity, which guarantees that a node forwarding a packet is unable to inspect the route, much less determine the original source or final destination. An added benefit of route anonymity is location anonymity—a node may suspect the presence of a node with a particular identity, but the node is unable to determine even the approximate physical location of the suspected node. The novelty of our approach is that our design goals are achieved using simple techniques, removing many of the compute intensive operations commonly associated with anonymous routing. In addition to anonymity guarantees, the protocol also ensures data privacy. This paper presents the details of our protocol, demonstrates its performance characteristics in comparison to alternative approaches, and analyzes its security properties. 1