Anonymous and location-concealing routing for multihop ad hoc and sensor networks

Anonymity and location privacy are two important aspects of network security for users. This thesis is concerned with location privacy and anonymity in multihop wireless ad hoc networks. More specifically, it proposes techniques to protect these features from being violated as a by-product of ad hoc routing protocols. We have proposed a novel destination-centric routing approach called Destination Controlled Routing (DCR) in which the destination is the master and controls how packets are delivered to it so that it remains unknown. In addition, DCR is designed in a way that it also preserves the location privacy and anonymity of the source node as well as the communication anonymity. Unlike other anonymous routing protocols for ad hoc networks, DCR is based on the proactive as opposed to the reactive routing approach.;For multihop wireless sensor networks, we have developed different versions of our DCARPS (Destination Controlled Anonymous Routing Protocol for Sensornets) protocol for high and low volume traffic load situations. Unlike most routing protocols for sensor networks, our DCARPS protocols do not use the sink-originated beacons that reveal the location of the sink. Finally, in order to accommodate the proactive nature of DCR, we have proposed a new low-overhead topology discovery protocol called 2hop-clustered NTDP based on link state routing.;We have also provided a formai security analysis for evaluating the security performance of any randomized routing protocol using an information-theoretical method based on entropy. We have applied this method to DCARPS and showed that it has a good performance in terms of location privacy.;We have instantiated DCR for various kinds of multihop ad hoc networks. For networks of type mesh and MANET, we have proposed three variations of our V-routing protocol based on this approach. We have also adapted V-routing to multicasting applications. Given a sufficient number of data flows in the network, V-routing can protect location privacy and communication anonymity against a global eavesdropper. It achieves this goal by using a transient destination node and hop-by-hop anonymous routing between that node and the real destination node in a way that the location of the real destination node does not need to be revealed.