On Address Privacy in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The network addresses of principals in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) are conventionally assumed to be public information. This may cause devastating consequences for MANETs deployed in hostile environments. For example, attackers can easily locate a target principal based his known network address and then launch a pinpoint attack. This paper identifies address privacy as a new security requirement to prevent attackers from ascertaining network addresses of MANET principals. We further present Swarms, the first solution to satisfying this requirement. Swarms eliminates the conventionally explicit one-on-one mappings between MANET principals and network addresses and allows any two principals to communicate while blind to each other’s address. We quantitatively measure the address privacy offered by Swarms via an entropybased information-theoretic metric.