Achieving Anonymity and Traceability in Wireless Networks

Anonymity provides protection for users to enjoy network services without being traced. While anonymity-related issues have been extensively studied in payment-based systems such as e-cash and peer-to-peer systems, little effort has been devoted to wireless mesh networks (WMNs). On the other hand, the network authority requires conditional anonymity such that misbehaving entities in the network remain traceable. In this paper, we propose security architecture to ensure unconditional anonymity for honest users and traceability of misbehaving users for network authorities in WMNs. The proposed architecture strives to resolve the conflicts between the anonymity and traceability objectives in addition to guaranteeing fundamental security requirements.