Anonymous handshakes in mobile ad hoc networks

The broadcast nature of radio transmissions renders communications in mobile ad hoc networks more vulnerable to malicious traffic analysis than their wired counterparts. As a result, adversaries can easily locate and trace mobile nodes based on their invariant identifiers so as to launch pinpoint attacks. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a novel anonymous on-demand routing protocol, called MASK, which nicely fulfills the routing and packet forwarding tasks without disclosing the identities of participating nodes under a rather strong adversarial model. MASK provides the desirable sender and receiver anonymity, as well as the relationship anonymity of the sender and receiver. It is also resistant to a wide range of adversarial attacks.