Formal analysis of privacy for routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Routing protocols aim at establishing a route between distant nodes in ad hoc networks. Secured versions of routing protocols have been proposed to provide more guarantees on the resulting routes, and some of them have been designed to protect the privacy of the users. In this paper, we propose a framework for analysing privacy-type properties for routing protocols. We use a variant of the applied-pi calculus as our basic modelling formalism. More precisely, using the notion of equivalence between traces, we formalise three security properties related to privacy, namely indistinguishability, unlinkability, and anonymity. We study the relationship between these definitions and we illustrate them using two versions of the ANODR routing protocol. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.