SECURITY AND COMMUNICATION NETWORKS Security Comm. Networks. 2009; 2:580–594 Published online 4 February 2009 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/sec.101 Using camouflaging mobility to protect privacy in mobile ad hoc networks ‡ Lei Tang 1∗,† , Xiaoyan Hong 2 and Susan Vrbsky 2 1 Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, U.S.A. 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, U.S.A. Summary The open nature of wireless medium has left wireless communications vulnerable to various privacy attacks. Much research work has been proposed to protect the identity anonymity of communicating parties, the anonymity of network routes and the location privacy of the message source and destination. However, with the advent of new radio identification and localization techniques, more advanced privacy attacks are possible. We describe a new privacy attack in which the adversary tries to infer the itineraries of the nodes in the network. To protect itinerary privacy, we design an algorithm, called -camouflaging mobility algorithm, which changes the original motion segments of a node into -shaped camouflaging paths. Itinerary privacy, correspondent privacy, and route privacy are closely related so we propose a comprehensive anonymous routing scheme, called MARS, to protect these privacy goals. MARS exploits camouflaging mobility to protect itinerary privacy and uses motion pseudonyms generated from the camouflaging mobility to protect correspondent privacy and route privacy without using cryptography. Our analysis results show that -camouflaging mobility algorithm is cost-effective, which can significantly reduce the itinerary exposure probability at a small cost of extra travel distance. Moreover, our network simulation results illustrated that MARS anonymous routing scheme and -camouflaging mobility algorithm did not reduce network layer performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: itinerary privacy; camouflaging mobility; anonymous routing; correspondent privacy; mobile ad-hoc networks 1. Introduction Privacy issues are becoming increasingly important for mobile ad hoc network (MANET) wireless communications. Adversaries in the network are able to eavesdrop on wireless communications to obtain the ∗ Correspondence to: Lei Tang, Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, U.S.A. † E-mail: ltang@rice.edu ‡ Part of this paper was presented in the IEEE WoWMoM 08, Workshop on Security, Privacy, and Authentication in Wireless Networks, Newport Beach, CA, 23–27 June 2008. information interested, for example, the IP addresses of message source and destination. Many privacy preserving schemes [1--6] have been proposed to address correspondent privacy, route privacy and location privacy. The objective of correspondent privacy is to prevent adversaries from discovering who Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.