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

TL;DR

This paper introduces EXTROUT, a route extrapolation technique that enhances privacy for source and destination nodes in wireless ad hoc networks, especially against powerful global attackers, outperforming existing fake node schemes.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel route extrapolation method, EXTROUT, providing stronger privacy protection against global attackers compared to existing fake source-destination schemes.

Findings

EXTROUT offers higher privacy levels against global attackers.

It outperforms existing fake node schemes in privacy protection.

The technique effectively camouflages real nodes along extended paths.

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.