Towards address privacy in mobile ad hoc networks

Security concerns are an impediment to deploying mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in hostile environments. This paper proposes and investigates solutions to a new security requirement called address privacy to prevent attackers from ascertaining network addresses of MANET principals. Lack of address privacy is devastating to critical MANET operations. For example, if knowing the network address of a target principal, attackers can easily locate the target by passively monitoring the open wireless channel and then launch a pinpoint attack. We present Swarms, the first solution to address privacy in MANETs. Swarms eliminates the conventionally explicit one-on-one mappings between MANET principals and network addresses and allows any two principals to communicate while blind to each other's address. We quantitatively measure the address privacy offered by Swarms via an entropy-based information-theoretic metric.