Source—destination obfuscation in wireless ad hocnetworks

The identity and/or location of communicating entities in wireless ad hoc networks is extremely important due to the potential of their being identified and subsequently subjected to cyber or physical attacks. In this paper, we show that a global attacker who can eavesdrop on the overall data transmissions and count them can simply visualize the transmissions and infer contextual information. Current approaches to obfuscate the locations of source and destinations do not provide protection against such attacks. We propose two novel techniques (1) SECLOUD: Source and Destination Seclusion using Clouds to obfuscate the true source/destination nodes and make them indistinguishable among a group of neighbor nodes, and (2) ANONYRING: Anonymous Ring which hides the source/destination nodes within a group of nodes that form a ring. Both proposed techniques work well even under network‐wide traffic visualization by a global attacker. Furthermore the proposed techniques are shown via simulation to be superior to existing schemes in the literature.