Anonymous multipath routing protocol based on secret sharing in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Because the intrinsic characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) cause several vulnerabilities, anonymous routing protocols attract much more attention in secure mobile ad hoc networks for the purposes of security and privacy concerns. Until recently, lots of anonymous routing protocols have been proposed. However, most of them are single path or use one path at a time, and the multipath schemes can not thwart both the passive attacks and active attacks simultaneously. Thus an anonymous multipath routing protocol based on secret sharing is proposed. The protocol provides identity anonymity, location anonymity, data and traffic anonymity by employing cryptograph technology and secret sharing in MANET communication process. Meanwhile, a hash function is introduced to detect active attacks in the data transmission process. The protocol can effectively thwart various passive attacks and reduce the successful probability of active attacks (such as interception and physical destroy attacks). Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a reasonably good level of network security and performance.