Protection Against Mobile Tracing Through Motion-MIX for Mobile Wireless Nodes

Mobile wireless networks, such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), are vulnerable to passive attacks that threaten the privacy of communications. Moreover, threats can now be launched from mobile platforms and with new techniques for eavesdropping, locating, and fingerprinting wireless transmissions. Recently, many wireless anonymous schemes have been studied, and mobility often plays an important role with regard to the effectiveness of wireless anonymity. In this paper, we focus on the impact of node motion behaviors. We first illustrate the emerging anonymity threat of venue privacy attacks (VPAs) to trace mobile wireless nodes. We then propose "motion-MIX" as the countermeasure to defend against the threat. Motion-MIX calls for protection at all the layers of the protocol stack. We further use a new asymptotic security model to verify motion-MIX's effectiveness against VPAs. In a scalable ad hoc network, we prove that the probability of security breach is negligible with respect to the number of network nodes.