An anonymous messaging system for Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Security and anonymity are vital components in today's networked world, and play critical roles in several reallife situations, such as whistleblowing, intelligence operations, oppressive governments, etc. In this paper, we study anonymous communications in the context of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Existing work in this area relies on the standard onion routing paradigm to provide anonymity and is, therefore, vulnerable to malicious nodes. To this end, we introduce a novel message forwarding algorithm that utilizes random walks to deliver messages to their destinations. By removing the requirement to list all the intermediate nodes on the end-to-end path, our method enhances considerably the anonymity of the underlying communications. Our simulation results show that the proposed forwarding algorithm achieves high message delivery rates, at the expense of a moderate computational overhead at the mobile devices.