ARMA: a scalable secure routing protocol with privacy protection for mobile ad hoc networks

With the rapidly growing popularity of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), many security concerns have arisen from this type of network. In particular, malicious nodes will jeopardize the security of mobile networks if the issues of secure data exchange are not handled properly. Encryption cannot fully protect the data communicated between nodes, as routing information may expose the identities of the communicating nodes and put their relationships at risk. In this paper, we propose an efficient anonymous routing protocol that uses a mobile agent paradigm for MANETs, which we refer to as ARMA. In our protocol, we take advantage of a trust system to prevent effectively the misbehavior of malicious nodes so that only trustworthy nodes are allowed to participate in communications. Furthermore, we present the Malicious Encryption and Malicious ID attacks, as well as other attacks, and note how our scheme is robust to them. Through the proof of protocol correctness, our protocol is analyzed to show how it offers provable security properties. Finally, we provide its performance evaluation based on simulation experiments implemented in an ns-2 simulator. Compared to the secure distributed route construction protocol (SDAR) protocol, our experimental results demonstrate that our scheme not only achieves the necessary anonymity in wireless and mobile networks, but also provides more security with reasonably little additional overhead. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.