| In environments such as smart communities and electronic health systems, security and privacy are becoming increasingly critical. Adversaries can use meta-data associated with data packets to launch traffic analyses and infer contextual information. Such attacks cannot be prevented by encrypting content of messages alone. Even when a sender encrypts a message it sends to a receiver, an adversary will still be able to infer some contextual information from observing the communication path. In this work, we explore the use of anonymous routing for preserving route privacy in a smart community wireless ad hoc network. While it achieves the desired outcome of preserving contextual privacy, anonymous routing is suboptimal in finding routes that optimize on a routing metric. In addition, this type of routing is susceptible to passive attacks from malicious nodes that attempt sinkhole attacks on the network. To tackle this problem, we improved upon an existing anonymous routing protocol by discovering paths that are hop-optimal in addition to identifying misbehaving nodes that subject the network to sinkhole attacks. Our protocol, EARP (Enhanced Anonymous Routing Protocol) is able to bypass such malicious nodes, leading to improved and faster packet delivery in anonymously routed smart community wireless networks. |
