An Anonymous Routing Protocol with Authenticated Key Establishment in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Anonymity is an important concern in wireless communications. Most anonymous routing protocols in ad hoc networks usually assume that a shared secret exists between the sender and the receiver. These protocols hide either the sender and the receiver or the intermediate nodes from the ad hoc network. Different from previous anonymous secure routing protocols, this paper proposes an anonymous routing protocol, ARAKE, which not only makes the sender and the receiver anonymous but also hides the intermediate nodes from the network simultaneously. To make the protocol more practical in dynamic network, ARAKE uses the public key to substitute the shared secret. In ARAKE, the receiver can authenticate the sender and gets a shared secret without extra key establishment processes. ARAKE can prevent packet analysis attack as well as most active attacks that are based on route information. The denial-of-service attack to specific session also can be restrained. The simulative results have shown that ARAKE outperforms a representative protocol ARAN in terms of both communication and energy overheads.