ANAP: Anonymous Authentication Protocol in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

The pervasiveness of wireless communication recently gave mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) a significant researchers' attention, due to its innate capabilities of instant communication in many time and mission critical applications. However, its natural advantages of networking in civilian and military environments make them vulnerable to security threats. Support for an anonymity in MANET is an orthogonal to security critical challenge we faced in this paper. We propose a new anonymous authentication protocol for mobile ad hoc networks enhanced with a distributed reputation system. The main its objective is to provide mechanisms concealing a real identity of communicating nodes with an ability of resist to known attacks. The distributed reputation system is incorporated for a trust management and malicious behavior detection in the network. The end-to-end anonymous authentication is conducted in three-pass handshake based on an asymmetric and symmetric key cryptography. After successfully finished authentication phase secure and multiple anonymous data channels are established. The anonymity is guarantied by randomly chosen pseudonyms owned by a user. Nodes of the network are publicly identified and are independent of users' pseudonyms. In this paper we presented an example of the protocol implementation.