Privacy within pervasive communications

In the era of “anywhere, anytime communication”, contextual security is becoming very important. Context security means preventing leakage of information about such aspects of communication as identities of the parties involved, their locations, frequency and the times of communications, and so on as opposed to content security which is concerned with protecting the transmitted data against eavesdropping and manipulation and is usually achieved using encryption and message digests. Routing protocols play an important role in this regard. All of the previously proposed solutions in this area are based on reactive routing. In this paper, we propose a solution called V-routing based on proactive routing protocols for ad hoc networks of the type Mesh and MANET that conceals the locations and the identities of the communicating parties as well as the fact that they are communicating. Our protocol resists an omni-present eavesdropper that tries to locate and identify the source and the destination of a data flow. V-routing is especially capable of hiding the destination, unlike many other secure routing protocols, because it is designed according to a novel routing paradigm that puts the destination in charge of how packets should be sent to it.