Achieving Privacy of Data Requests in MANETs by Means of Piggybacking and Hop Modification

Caching systems have been proposed for MANETs to increase data availability and reduce data access delays. Every caching system is composed of three main components. The first component is requesting the data items from the server into the caching system. The second component is publishing the cached items in the network (or advertising them). While, the third component relates to nodes requesting cached items, or in other words pulling the items. These three aspects have inherent privacy problems that result in exposing the identities of the participants and in profiling their interests. In this work, we survey existing caching architectures for privacy vulnerabilities and propose a privacy preserving system that can operate on top of any existing caching system that provides anonymity and untraceability objectives. The system was implemented using ns-2 and proved to achieve high levels of anonymity with mitigated delays and overhead traffic.