ARMA: An Efficient Secure Ad Hoc Routing Protocol

Abstract

The motivation of this paper is to propose a novel secure distributed anonymous routing protocol in wireless mobile ad hoc networks. The objective of the protocol is not only to protect the anonymity and private information of the communicating nodes, but also to protect the security of the route discovery and prevent some malicious behaviors during the two- way conversation. Unlike other related anonymous protocols, in our protocol a source node does not need to collect and maintain the topological information of the network. Additionally, the mobile agent technique and the multicast mechanism used in our protocol protect the privacy of the sender and receiver of a message, while also providing protection for the message content as it traverses a network. They guarantee the anonymity of the sender node, receiver node, and their relationships. In this paper, we present our secure ad hoc routing protocol, which we refer to as ARMA, and provide its proof of correctness.