Anonymity and Security in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile adhoc networks, generating and maintaining anonymity for any adhoc node is challenging because of the node mobility, dynamic network topology, cooperative nature of the network and broadcast nature of the communication media. Anonymity is provided to protect the communication, by hiding the participants as well as the message contents. Existing techniques based on cryptosystem and broadcasting cannot be easily adapted to MANETs because of their extensive cryptographic computations and/or large communication overheads. In this paper, we first propose an unconditionally secure privacy preserving message authentication scheme (PPMAS) which uses Modified New variant EIGamal signature Scheme (MNES). This scheme enables a sender to transmit messages, providing authentication along with anonymity, without relying on any trusted third parties. The anonymous message uses privacy preserving communication protocol for MANET, which is capable of anonymous end to end connections. It also allows the untraceability of the link between the identifier of a node and its location. The experimental analysis of the proposed system is presented.