A-HIP: A solution offering secure and anonymous communications in MANETs

Abstract

Offering secure and anonymous communications in mobile ad hoc networking environments is essential to promote confidence and widespread adoption of this kind of networks. In this paper we propose and implement a novel solution based on the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) that offers both security and user-level anonymity in MANET environments. In particular, we introduce enhancements to the authentication process to achieve Host Identity Tag (HIT) relationship anonymity, along with source/destination HIT anonymity when combined with multi-homing. We implemented our proposal in an experimental testbed, and the results obtained show that the performance degradation introduced by our proposal is minimal. We also detail how to efficiently integrate the proposed mechanism with both a reactive (DSR) and a proactive (OLSR) routing protocol. The improvements achieved using the routing-specific enhancements that we propose are then quantified analytically. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.