FAN: friendship based anonymous routing in wireless social mobile networks of malicious communities

Abstract

Pocket Switched Networks (PSN) whose main feature is the social-guided movement of users/devices, have attracted the attention of many researchers in the last years, mostly for the common belief to be a key technology in providing innovative services without the need of a fixed network infrastructure. However, the opportunistic and intermittent nature of the contacts among users make it very difficult to design secure and trustworthy services for these networks. In particular, anonymous communication remains among the most difficult services to achieve. In this paper we present FAN (Friendship based ANonymity), a primitive that exploits strong friendship relationships among users to provide source anonymity and sender-receiver unlinkability in Pocket Switched Networks. The primitive is independent of the forwarding mechanism underneath, and therefore, can be coupled with any routing protocol. As shown from our large experimental results with different real data traces, FAN outperforms the TPS scheme, its only rival that provides the same anonymity properties for Pocket Switched Networks, in terms of delay, cost, and network throughput.