| Privacy is a very important aspect of security in wireless mobile networks (WMNs). Instead of merely addressing the confidentiality of data content, for privacy more concerns are put on hiding the relationships between communication entities. Due to the unique characteristics of WMNs, privacy preservation in communication faces challenges that need special consideration. With various possibilities of attack models, new anonymity requirements continue to emerge. On the other hand, different application domains require different levels of privacy protection. Protocol designs targeted at certain anonymity specifications may only take a subset of anonymity aspects into account. Tradeoffs are identified between the strength of anonymity protection and overhead.;This dissertation aims at gaining an in-depth understanding of the privacy issues in WMNs and developing new metrics and solutions to meet the emerging needs. First, the privacy protection architecture is studied through evaluation of anonymous communication systems. It includes anonymity analysis and performance evaluation of representative existing work on on-demand anonymous routing. In addition, an evaluation of a zone-based anonymous positioning routing protocol is presented to further investigate the tradeoffs between privacy protection and routing efficiency. After that, the dissertation proposes two new anonymous routing protocols. The first one addresses anonymity in hierarchical routing, and the second one deals with privacy protection against attacks exploiting geographical path regularity in data forwarding. The dissertation further extends to address privacy issues in wireless network access. Particularly, the research focuses on privacy-preservation in authentication. In the dissertation, a set of efficient and anonymous authentication schemes are proposed for fast roaming networks. They feature anonymous authentication with minimum message overhead and fast response time, and are suitable for high-mobility network environments. |
