POR: Privacy-Preserving On-Demand Routing Scheme to Mitigate Malicious Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any centralized administration or standard support services. Providing privacy and security is a critical problem when implementing MANET in an adversarial environment. A malicious node may pose a serious security threats for communication in the network. Such nodes participate in the route discovery and data forwarding phase and degrade routing performance. A privacy-preserving on-demand routing (POR) scheme is proposed to mitigate the effects of malicious nodes through anonymity related features. The POR is designed based on the combination of an identity-based group signature scheme and cryptographic onion – a cryptographic scheme is used to achieve anonymity. The simulation results show the importance of anonymity through the analysis of traceable ratio and routing performance of the proposed scheme. Index: Anonymity, Privacy, Security, Routing, MANET.