Camouflaging mobility for itinerary privacy in mobile ad-hoc networks

Abstract

The privacy of wireless communications is becoming an important issue due to the open nature of wireless medium. Much research work has been proposed to address the anonymity of communicating parties, the location privacy of the message source and destination, and the privacy of the network routing paths. However, with the advent of new radio identification and localization techniques, more advanced privacy attacks are possible. We describe a new privacy attack in which the adversary tries to infer the itineraries of the nodes in the network. To protect itinerary privacy, we design an algorithm, called the Delta-mobility camouflaging algorithm, which can be applied upon any mobility model by changing the original motion segments into Delta-shaped camouflaging paths. Our analysis results show that the Delta-mobility camouflaging algorithm is cost-effective, which in most cases decreases the itinerary exposure probability more than 80% at a cost of less than 3% extra travel distance.