Abstract
Wireless networks such as WLANs which have already been commonplace will play an important role in providing the last mile access for ubiquitous computing environments. However, the wireless access technologies are accompanied with some security vulnerabilities that stem from the broadcasting medium. Although most of the vulnerabilities can be solved by the existing security countermeasures, there still exists the vulnerability of a message header. In most wireless access networks, the header part of each message, including the source and destination addresses, is transmitted in a plain-text format. This can be a security hole with adversaries collecting the revealed header information for a traffic analysis attack that can breach the privacy of the transmitter and receiver. In this paper, we focus on describing a solution to this problem, namely, the undesirable loss of privacy. Our main idea is to integrate address information with a conventional Message Authentication Code (MAC) and to replace both fields of the address and the MAC by an integrated code called the Address-embedded MAC (AMAC). Through detailed performance and security analysis of our scheme, we show that our AMAC scheme can guarantee privacy of a network while providing a provable security level with less overhead.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Basagni, S., Herrin, K., Bruschi, D., & Rosti, E. (2001). Secure pebblenets. In Proceedings of ACM MobiHoc (pp. 156–163).
Boukerche, A., El-Khatib, K., Xu, L., & Korba, L. (2004). SDAR: A secure distributed anonymous routing protocol for wireless and mobile ad hoc networks. In Proceedings of IEEE LCN (pp. 618–624).
Chaum D. (1981) Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM 24(2): 84–88
Kong, J., & Hong, X. (2003). ANODR: Anonymous on demand routing with untraceable routes for mobile ad-hoc networks. In Proceedings of ACM MobiHoc.
Reiter, M. K., & Rubin, A. D. (1998). Crowds: Anonymity for web transactions. ACMTISS: ACM Transactions on Information and System Security 1.
Shields, C., & Levine, B. N. (2000). A protocol for anonymous communication over the internet. In ACM SIGSAC: 7th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
Song, R., Korba, L., & Yee, G. (2005). AnonDSR: Efficient anonymous dynamic source routing for mobile ad-hoc networks. In V. Atluri, P. Ning & W. Du (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Security of ad hoc and Sensor Networks, SASN 2005, November 7 (pp. 33–42). Alexandria, VA, USA.
Park, M. H., & Seo, S. W. (2007). A pseudonym assignment for the last mile wireless access to 4g networks. In Globecom Workshops, IEEE.
Gruteser, M., & Grunwald, D. (2005). Enhancing location privacy in wireless lan through disposable interface identifiers: A quantitative analysis. ACM MONET 10.
Jiang, T., Wang, H. J., & Hu, Y. C. (2007). Preserving location privacy in wireless lans. In Mobisys, ACM
Greenstein, B., McCoy, D., & Pang, J. (2008). Improving wireless privacy with an identifier-free link layer protocol. In Mobisys, ACM
Armknecht, F., Girão, J., Matos, A., & Aguiar, R. L. (2007). Who said that? privacy at link layer. In Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM (pp. 2521–2525).
Matos, A., Aguiar, R. L., Girao, J., & Armnecht, F. (2008). Toward dependable networking: Secure location and privacy at the link layer. IEEE Wireless Communications (Vol. 15).
IEEE. (1999). IEEE Std 802.11-1999, Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications (ed.).
IEEE. (2003). IEEE Std 802.15.4-2003, Part 15.4: Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs) (ed.).
IEEE. (2004). IEEE Std 802.16-2004, Part 16: Air Interface for Fixed Broadband Wireless Access Systems (ed.).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Park, MH., Son, JH. & Seo, SW. Anonymous Communication in Ubiquitous Computing Environments. Wireless Pers Commun 56, 21–36 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-009-9884-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-009-9884-z