Preserving Privacy Using an Unobservable Secure Routing Protocol for MANETs

Privacy preserving routing is crucial for some ad-hoc networks. Numbers of schemes have been proposed to protect privacy in ad-hoc networks. None of these schemes offer complete unlinkability or unobservability property since data packets and control packets are still linkable and distinguishable in these schemes. In this project, stronger privacy requirements are defined regarding privacy-preserving routing in mobile ad-hoc networks. Then an unobservable secure routing scheme is proposed to offer complete unlinkability and content unobservability for all types of packets. This protocol is efficient as it uses a combination of group signature and ID-based encryption for route discovery. Security analysis demonstrates that Unobservable Secure Routing (USR) protocol can protect user privacy against both inside and outside attackers. USR is implemented on ns2, and its performance is evaluated by comparing with the existing schemes. The simulation results show that this protocol achieves stronger privacy protection than existing schemes.