Time-Based Confidentiality Enhancement Scheme for Mobile Wireless Networks

Abstract

A multi-hop wireless network with highly dynamic members and mobility is vulnerable to many attacks. To address this problem, we propose a novel time-based approach that exploits mobility. In our scheme, the source sends shares at different times. Due to node mobility, these shares will be routed through different intermediate nodes. It is highly unlikely that a particular intermediate node is able to be on many of these routes and to collect enough shares to reconstruct the original message. The scheme is particularly suitable for applications that can tolerate long message delays, as studied in Delay Tolerant Networks. The article focuses on analyzing the feasibility of this scheme. We describe a general approach to calculate the probability of intercepting enough shares by arbitrary nodes, together with simulations. The results show that the probability is small. The scheme provides a valuable alternative for delay tolerant applications to enhance message confidentiality.