AN ABSTRACT IN ANONYMOUS ROUTING PROTOCOL

Anonymous routing protocol with multiple hops for communications in Highly dynamic hetrogenious networks

Abstract

      Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are increasingly adopted in both military and civilian uses due to its self configuration and self-maintenance capabilities. MANETs are higly vulnerable to security threats due to inherent charateristics as wireless transmission , lack of fixed infrastructure , dynamically changing topoly, etc. The broadcast nature of the wireless medium makes MANETs susceptible to various malicious attacks. Traffics annalsis is one of the most serious security attacks in MANETs. By obeserving network traffic pattern , adversaries can obtain sensitive information about the applications even through the contents of the messages remain secret. For example, an attacker can identify the communicating parties and their positions by tracing and analyzing the network traffic patterns. This may lead to severe threats in security –sensitive applications. For instance , in a battle field the enemy can physically destroy the important mobile nodes if they can identify and locate suck nodes by traffic analysis . In order to thwat such attacks , ananymous communication protocols are developed.

       Anonymous communication protocols have been studied in wired networks. Chaum defined a layered packet structure that routes data through a chain of pre-deployed intermediate nodes caleled MIXes. Following their work an Onion routing protocol is proposed, in which each data packet is wrapped in a series of encrypted onion bye a series of proxies. However, those proposals in the wired network.

         A mobile ad hoc network consists of mobile nodes that communicate in an open wireless medim . Adverarues can launch analysis against the routing information embedded in the routing message and data packets to detect the traffic pattern of the communication, thereby obtaining senstive information of the system,such as the identity of a critical node. In order to thwart such attacks , anonymous routing protocols are developed . For the purposes of security and robustness , an ideal anonymous routing protocals should hide the identities of nodes in the route, in particular , those of the source and the destination. Multiple routes should be established to increase the difficulty of traffic analysis and to avoid broken paths due to node mobility . Existing schemes either make the unrealistic and undesired assumption that certain topological information about the network is known to the nodes , or cannot achieve all the properties described in  the above . In the paper , we propose an anonymous routing protocol with multiple routes called ARMR, which can satisfy all the required properties. In addition, the protocal has the flexibility of creating fake routes to confuse the adversaries , thus increasing the level of anonmity. In the terms of communication efficiency , extensive simultion is carried out. Compared with AODV and MASK , our ARMR protocol gives a higer route request success rate under all situations and delay of our protocol is comparable to the best of these two protocols.