Route Extrapolation for Source and Destination Camouflage in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract: In wireless ad hoc networks, protecting source and destination nodes location privacy is a challenging task due to malicious traffic analysis and privacy attacks. Existing solutions, such as incorporating fake source destination pairs in the network, provide some privacy of real source and destination nodes against attackers. Moreover, ad hoc networks need stronger privacy protection against powerful global attacker which has knowledge of overall network topology and, that can also eavesdrop and visualize network wide data transmissions. In this paper, we present a novel privacy technique, (EXTROUT) Route Extrapolation to camouflage the real source and destination nodes along an extended path in an ad hoc network. We demonstrate that the privacy level achieved with EXTROUT is higher and more effective against a global attacker, when compared to fake source destination nodes privacy scheme.