Anonymous proactive routing for wireless infrastructure mesh networks

Abstract

An overlay routing protocol for infrastructure mesh networks is proposed that preserves user location privacy, source anonymity, destination anonymity and communication anonymity against an omni-present eavesdropper, when the underlying routing protocol is based on a proactive approach. A client only trusts its immediate access router. In order to receive packets, a client establishes a secret hop-by-hop virtual circuit between an arbitrary router, called its Rendezvous Point (RP) and its own access router, ahead of time. Packets destined for that client would be sent to RP first. To thwart content analysis attacks, we have used per-hop encryption. Authenticity and confidentiality of exchanged messages are also ensured using a public key infrastructure (PKI). © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.