Research On Anonymous Routing In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The features of a mobile Ad hoc network, such as mobile nodes, self-organization, no center, and multi-hop radio transmission, etc., make it vulnerable to specific attacks. In some application fields of mobile Ad hoc networks (as battlefields), the leakage of some sensitive information, such as the identity and location of nodes, routes, etc., in addition to the attackers is easily intercept packets, is a threat to network security. Therefore, privacy-preserving has become one of important research problem of mobile Ad hoc networks security.And the anonymous routing can preserve this privacy information. But there are some limitations in the previous anonymous routing protocols, such as non-anonymity, high computing cost of the protocol algorithm, and large amounts of communication costs caused by lack of effective control of routing request packets (RREQ)'s flooding hops. Thus, this paper presents an inferring method of the source's hops based on the variation of the request packet, and also proposes an efficient Multi-path Anonymous Routing Protocol (MAR).In MAR, the source inserts an integer (M) which has an initial value in RREQ, and each forwarding node adds the lowest bit of random sequence to the integer (M). And then, if the integer (M) reaches the default maximum, RREQ will be discarded to control its flooding hops effectively. This paper also proposes an encryption structure named keybox to avoid RREQ's regular variation in the forwarding process. Thus, the attacker can't infer the source's hops based on the variation of the RREQ. MAR could reduce the nodes'computing costs by the following aspects. Firstly, it makes use of symmetric encryption algorithm; secondly, it inserts the symmetric key hash to the packets'header, and then seeks the symmetric key by the hash for decrypting to reduce the number of decryption.In this paper, both the simulation experiments and the theoretical analysis prove that MAR could control RREQ's hops effectively, and it with the lower costs of nodes'computing, it also provides different desirable anonymous properties such as identity privacy, location privacy and route anonymity.