Anonymous privacy-preserving routing in location based dynamic ad-hoc networks

Privacy-preserving routing is crucial for some ad hoc networks that require stronger privacy protection. A number of anonymous routing schemes have been proposed for ad hoc networks in recent years, and they provide different level of secure protection at different cost. These schemes are more scalable to network size, but require more computation effort. However, existing schemes provide only anonymity and non-availability, while non-observability is never considered or implemented by now. The main drawback in existing schemes is that packets are not secure as a whole. A secure privacy-preserving routing protocol APPRP that achieves content non-observability by employing anonymous key establishment based on group signature. APPRP is to protect all parts of a packet´s content and it is independent of solutions on traffic pattern non-observability. The non-observable routing protocol is then executed in two phases. First, a secure key establishment process is performed to construct secret session keys. Then a non observable route discovery process is executed to find a route to the destination.