Anonymous authentication and secure communication protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

The main characteristic of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is its infrastructure-less, highly dynamic topology, which is subject to malicious traffic analysis. Malicious intermediate nodes in MANETs are a threat concerning security as well as anonymity of exchanged information. In this paper, we propose an anonymous on-demand routing protocol, called RINOMO, to protect anonymity and achieve security of nodes in MANETs. After successful authentication of the legitimate nodes in the network they can use their pseudo IDs for secure communication. Pseudo IDs of the nodes are generated considering pairing-based cryptography. Nodes can generate their pseudo IDs independently and dynamically without consulting with system administrator. As a result, RINOMO reduces pseudo IDs maintenance costs. Only trust-worthy nodes are allowed to take part in routing to discover a route. To ensure trustiness each node has to make authentication to its neighbors through the designed anonymous authentication process. Thus, RINOMO safely communicates between nodes without disclosing node identities. It also provides different desirable anonymous properties such as identity privacy, location privacy, route anonymity, and robustness against several attacks. Mathematical analysis of privacy loss is also evaluated and it shows there is no loss of privacy with respect to time. Thus, RINOMO is an anonymous robust protocol in MANETs. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.