TARo: Trusted Anonymous Routing for MANETs

Abstract

The currently proposed anonymous routing mechanisms for Mobile Ad hoc Networks enable network entities to anonymously and securely communicate with each other. However, protocols that provide a high level of anonymity generally have poor scalability due to delays and overhead introduced by cryptographic operations, while other approaches sacrifice anonymity to achieve better performance. In this paper, we propose a novel anonymous routing protocol that provides improved anonymity and security while achieving similar or better performance, as compared to existing proposals. Our proposal achieves anonymity using a novel efficient solution for invisible implicit addressing based on keyed hash chain and security via a novel application of one-to-many Diffie-Hellman mechanism, used to exchange keys for symmetric encryption. The final contribution includes a mechanism to facilitate selection of a trusted route by verifying connections between intermediate nodes. We demonstrate the benefits of our proposal in comparison with previous approaches using analysis and simulation.