Secure and Efficient Traffic Pattern Discovery in MANETs

Anonymous Communication is a critical issue in case of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). It is very tough to learn the source and destination of the communication link and the other intermediate nodes that are involved in the communication. Many techniques are proposed to improve the anonymous communication in case of MANETs. However, MANETs are vulnerable under certain situations like passive attacks and traffic analysis attacks. Here the traffic analysis problem, expose some of the methods and attacks that could conclude that MANETs are weak under the passive attacks. To clearly show how to find the hidden traffic patterns without decrypting the caught packets, Secure and Efficient Traffic Pattern Discovery (SETPD) in MANETs is proposed. In order to discover the communication patterns SETPD works passively and carries out the traffic analysis depending upon the statistical features of the caught raw traffic. SETPD has the ability to find the source node, destination node and the end-to-end communication path in case of mobile ad-hoc networks. Keywords— Anonymous Communication, Mobile ad-hoc network, Passive attack, Statistical traffic analysis, Traffic patterns, Statistical features, End-to-end communication path.