Novel Secure and Immune Private Routing Protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The user anonymity is an important security factor to protect personal privacy in mobile ad hoc networks. Recently, Wu et al. proposed an ad hoc on-demand position-based private routing protocol (AO2P), but the AO2P is vulnerable to some collaborative attacks, such as blackhole & wormhole attacks. Once any compromised node is included in a route, it can conduct different attacks, which are very difficult to identify because of the pseudo identifiers in the AO2P. In order to immunize the mobile ad hoc networks against the collaborative attacks and enhance the security of the private routing protocol, a novel secure and immune private routing protocol is proposed and called as NSIPRP, in this paper. The NSIPRP is based on the native immunization of mobile nodes and the immune reconfiguration of the mobile ad hoc networks, and can be used to protect private information against the collaborative attacks. Analytical models are developed for evaluating the performances of the packet delivery ratio and the probability of routing failure. Analysis and simulation results show that, while the NSIPRP immunizes the mobile ad hoc networks against the collaborative attacks and preserves communication privacy in the mobile ad hoc networks, its routing performance is comparable with other position-based routing algorithms such as the AO2P.