An Efficient Method for Preventing Mobile Tracing Using Motion-Mix Over Mobile Wireless Nodes

Providing security and privacy in mobile ad hoc networks has been a major issue over the last few years. It is more challenging due to advances in techniques of eavesdropping, locating and fingerprinting wireless transmissions. In particular, the mobile ad hoc networks are vulnerable to passive attacks that threaten the privacy of communications. In this paper, we first investigate the emerging threat of venue privacy attacks (VPAs) to trace mobile wireless nodes. We then propose motion-mix as the solution. The motion-mix is a geographic area in which the relation between nodes is hidden. The motion-mix provides protection at all the layers of the protocol stack. The necessary conditions to implement motion-mix are then studied. We further verify the effectiveness of motion-mix against venue privacy attack using a simulated network security model. We prove that the probability of security breach is negligible with respect to the polynomial-bounded network scale. This notion is conforming to the existing security notions in computational cryptography, where the polynomial-bounded metric is key length.