Secure and Privacy-preserving Querying of Content in MANETs

Ensuring security and privacy of content in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a challenging problem, especially when that content is distributed over the network using some form of peer-to-peer dissemination scheme. Since cooperation among nodes is vital in MANETs, the capture or compromise of a single node not only exposes locally cached content, but also allows an adversary to interrogate the network with the authority of an insider, acquiring important information such as content access patterns, popularity and location. Previous work in MANETs has predominantly focused on providing solutions for security and anonymity of routing protocols, confidentiality, and key management. In this paper, we present protocols that provide the ability to securely and privately locate content for two common peer-to-peer dissemination operations: publish/subscribe (content PUSH), and direct query (content PULL).