SECLOUD: Source and Destination Seclusion Using Clouds for wireless ad hoc networks

The privacy of communicating entities in wireless ad hoc networks is extremely important due to the potential of their being identified and subsequently subjected to attacks (e.g., in military networks). Previously, random walk and fractal propagation schemes have been proposed to address privacy of source and destination nodes in ad hoc or sensor networks. Entropy of packet transmissions has been used as the metric for comparison. In this paper, we show that under a global attacker that can eavesdrop on the overall data transmissions and count them, neither of these approaches provide sufficient privacy when the attacker can visualize the transmissions and infer contextual information. Moreover, we show that the entropy is not a useful metric in such a case. We propose SECLOUD: Source and Destination Seclusion using Clouds to obfuscate the true source/destination nodes and make them indistinguishable among a group of neighbor nodes which works well even under network-wide traffic visualization by a global attacker.