APADV – Anonymous Proactive Distance Vector Routing in Connectivity-Restricted Environments
摘要
Due to their flexibility and independence from fixed infrastructure, wireless ad hoc networks enable communication in environments where information exchange is restricted and common infrastructure is unavailable, including protests in authoritarian regimes with internet censorship, particularly internet shutdowns. Given the possible sensibility of the transmitted data and the herewith associated consequences of giving away personal information, it is important to ensure that the user remains anonymous. Mix networks have proven to offer strong anonymity guarantees, but they were not designed with dynamic and connectivity-restricted networks in mind. In this paper, we adapt mix networks for wireless ad hoc networks by leveraging route discovery protocols for the communication between mixes and users. Furthermore, we mitigate denial-of-service attacks through an anonymous rate limiting protocol, which relies on linkable ring signatures to detect violation of the limit. Our results, based on a custom discrete-event simulator, show that mix networks can be effective in such environments, but scale badly under certain conditions.