SDAR: a secure distributed anonymous routing protocol for wireless and mobile ad hoc networks

Providing security and privacy in mobile ad hoc networks has been a major issue over the last few years. Most research work has so far focused on providing security for routing and data content, but nothing has been done in regard to providing privacy and anonymity over these networks. We propose a novel distributed routing protocol which guarantees security, anonymity and high reliability of the established route in a hostile environment, such as an ad hoc wireless network, by encrypting the routing packet header and abstaining from using unreliable intermediate nodes. The major objective of our protocol is to allow trustworthy intermediate nodes to participate in the path construction protocol without jeopardizing the anonymity of the communicating nodes. We describe our protocol, SDAR (secure distributed anonymous routing), and provide its proof of correctness.