A lightweight anonymous routing protocol without public key en/decryptions for wireless ad hoc networks

Mote attention should be paid to anonymous routing protocols in secure wireless ad hoc networks. However, as far as we know, only a few papers on secure routing protocols have addressed both issues of anonymity and efficiency. Most recent protocols adopted public key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions to ensure the anonymity and security of route constructing mechanisms. Since PKI solution requires huge and expensive infrastructure with complex computations and the resource constraints of small ad hoc devices; a two-layer authentication protocol with anonymous routing (TAPAR) is proposed in this paper. TAPAR does not adopt public key computations to provide secure and anonymous communications between source and destination nodes over wireless ad hoc networks. Moreover, TAPAR accomplishes mutual authentication, session key agreement, and forward secrecy among communicating nodes; along with integration of non-PKI techniques into the routing protocol allowing the source node to anonymously interact with the destination node through a number of intermediate nodes. Without adopting PKI en/decryptions, our proposed TAPAR can be efficiently implemented on small ad hoc devices while at least reducing the computational overhead of participating nodes in TAPAR by 21.75%. Our protocol is certainly favorable when compared with other related protocols. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.