Effects of Adding Arbitrary Physical Nodes(APNs) to a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET)Utilizing a Anonymous Routing Protocol

Purpose Current anonymity systems tend to sacrifice at least on of the following, low latency, high bandwidth, or resistance to traffic analysis MANETs particularly weak to TA Depending on the network TA can be particularly damaging as well APNs can lend strength to where an anonymity system is weak

Two General Effect for All MANETs Increase Cost of Traffic Analysis Make Network Topology Closer to Overlay ObfuscateTraffic Fairly general will give more details soon

Network Topology and Traffic Analysis Theoretical TopologyActual Topology

Topologies with Addition of APN Theoretical TopologyActual Topology

Obfuscate Traffic Can mean several things

Obfuscate Traffic Because the APN doesn’t need to send real data there are a few options These vary heavily based on routing protocol used Can send fake response back to nodes whose message is routed through it Can send a second fake packet routed differently than original to obfuscate destination Reasons for using the dummy node for these are its local resources can be dedicated to generation of dummy messages Also depending on the routing protocol used a dummy node can thwart certain local attackers

References A Survey on Anonymous Routing Protocols in MANET Shino et al Towards Efficient Traffic-analysis Resistant Anonymity Networks Le Blond et al