Ensuring data confidentiality and privacy in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are autonomous systems
which are comprised of a number of mobile nodes that communicate between
themselves by wireless communication in a peer-to-peer basis. They are
self-organized, self-configured and self-controlled infrastructure-less networks.
Nodes can communicate with each other without any pre-planned or a base station. Disseminating information securely between these nodes in such networks
however is a challenging task, particularly when the information is confidential.
Revealing such information to anyone else other than the intended nodes could be
highly damaging, especially in military applications where keeping the message
secret from adversaries is essential. In this paper we present our novel framework
for privacy control in mobile ad hoc networks in which privacy policies are attached to messages as they are send between peers. We evaluate our framework
using the Network Simulator (NS-2) to provide and check whether the privacy
and confidentiality of the originator are met. For this we implemented the privacy
enforcement as an NS2 agent that manages and enforces the policies attached to
packets at every node in the MANET.