ALARM: Anonymous Location-Aided Routing in Suspicious MANETs

In many traditional mobile network scenarios, nodes establish communication on the basis of persistent public identities. However, in some hostile and suspicious MANET settings, node identities must not be exposed and node movements must be untraceable. Instead, nodes need to communicate on the basis of nothing more than their current locations. In this paper, we address some interesting issues arising in such MANETs by designing an anonymous routing framework (ALARM). It uses nodes´ current locations to construct a secure MANET map. Based on the current map, each node can decide which other nodes it wants to communicate with. ALARM takes advantage of some advanced cryptographic primitives to achieve node authentication, data integrity, anonymity and untraceability (tracking-resistance). It also offers resistance to certain insider attacks.