Achieving Receiver Location Privacy in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Privacy attacks to ad hoc routing protocols become an important issue as mobile ad hoc networks enter security critical domains. The location privacy of end nodes remains to be solved even when identification anonymity issues are addressed in the wireless routing protocol. Location privacy attacks can be performed by tracing either route discovery messages or data packets in order to discover the message's origin or destination venue. In this work we propose a protocol to provide receiver location privacy in mobile ad hoc networks. In general, anonymity is achieved by hiding the entity of interest among a number of similar entities, the anonymity set, so that it is not obvious to outsiders which anonymity set member is the real entity. The main contribution of this paper is to perform the routing in a way that the location of the destination node cannot be discovered by the adversary. This protocol supports receiver location privacy even against a global traffic analyzer. We use both, privacy analysis and simulation, to study the anonymity and routing performance for the proposed approach.