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An ad hoc network is a group of wireless mobile computers (or nodes), in which individual nodes cooperate by forwarding packets for each other to allow nodes to communicate beyond direct wireless transmission range. Prior research in ad hoc networking has generally studied the routing problem in a non-adversarial setting, assuming a trusted environment. In this paper, we present attacks against routing in ad hoc networks, and we present the design and performance evaluation of a new secure on-demand ad hoc network routing protocol, called Ariadne. Ariadne prevents attackers or compromised nodes from tampering with uncompromised routes consisting of uncompromised nodes, and also prevents many types of Denial-of-Service attacks. In addition, Ariadne is efficient, using only highly efficient symmetric cryptographic primitives.

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A b s t r a c t An on-demand routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks is one that searches for and attempts to discover a route to some destination node only when a sending node originates a data packet addressed to that node. In order to avoid the need for such a route discovery to be performed before each data packet is sent, such routing protocols must cache routes previously discovered. This paper presents an analysis of the effects of different design choices for this caching in on-demand routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks, dividing the problem into choices of cache structure, cache capacity, and cache timeout. Our analysis is based on the Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR), which operates entirely on-demand. Using detailed simulations of wireless ad hoc networks of 50 mobile nodes, we studied a large number of different caching algorithms that utilize a range of design choices, and simulated each cache primarily over a set of 50 different movement scenarios drawn from 5 different types of mobility models. We also define a set of new mobility metrics that allow accurate characterization of the relative difficulty that a given movement scenario presents to an ad hoc network routing protocol, and we analyze each mobility metric's ability to predict the actual difficulty in terms of routing overhead experienced by the routing protocol across the scenarios in our study. I n t r o d u c t i o nCaching is an important part of any on-demand routing protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. In an ad hoc network [10, 6], all nodes cooperate in order to dynamically establish and maintain routing in the network, forwarding packets for each other to allow communication between nodes not directly within wireless transmission range. Rather than using the periodic or background exchange of routing information common in most routing protocols, an on-demand routing protocol is one that searches for and attempts to discover a route to some destination node only when a sending node originates a data packet addressed to that node. In order to avoid the need for such a route discovery to be performed before each data packet is sent, an on-demand routing protocol must cache routes previously discovered. Such caching then introduces the problem of proper strategies for managing the structure and contents of this cache as nodes in the network move in and out of wireless transmission range of one another, possibly invalidating some cached routing information.Several routing protocols for wireless ad hoc networks have used on-demand mechanisms, including TORA [14], DSR [9], AODV [15], ZRP [4], and LAR [11]. For example, in the Dynamic Source Routing protocol (DSR) [l, 8, 9] in its simplest form, when some node S originates a data packet destined for a node D to which S does not currently know a route, S initiates a new Route Discovery by beginning a controlled flood of a request packet through the network. When a copy of this request packet reaches either D or another node that has a cached route to D, this node then...

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The broadcast and tetherless nature of wireless networks and the widespread deployment of Wi-Fi hotspots makes it easy to remotely locate a user by observing her wireless signals. Location is private information and can be used by malicious individuals for blackmail, stalking, and other privacy violations. In this paper, we analyze the problem of location privacy in wireless networks and present a protocol for improving location privacy. Our basic approach is to obfuscate several types of privacy-compromising information revealed by a mobile node, including sender identity, time of transmission, and signal strength. Our design is driven by realsystem implementation and field experiments along with analysis and simulations. Our system allows users to choose the level of privacy they desire, thereby increasing the performance of less private users (while not sacrificing private users' privacy at the same time). We evaluated our system based on real-life mobility data and wireless LAN coverage. Our results show that a user of our system can be indistinguishable from a thousand users in the same coverage area.

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In-network source authentication and path validation are fundamental primitives to construct higher-level security mechanisms such as DDoS mitigation, path compliance, packet attribution, or protection against flow redirection. Unfortunately, currently proposed solutions either fall short of addressing important security concerns or require a substantial amount of router overhead. In this paper, we propose lightweight, scalable, and secure protocols for shared key setup, source authentication, and path validation. Our prototype implementation demonstrates the efficiency and scalability of the protocols, especially for software-based implementations.