Privacy for caching applications in MANETS

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) have become increasingly popular with the rapid emergence of hand-held devices and advanced communication technologies. As a result, several MANET applications have been proposed one of which is the data access application. To enhance the performance of this application cache management systems have been suggested; however, they have been designed regardless of the privacy concerns they raise. 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 components are common to all caching systems, and recur in one way or another. These three aspects have inherent privacy problems that result in exposing the identities of the participants and in profiling their interests. In this proposed work, we study the cache management system COACS (A cooperative and advanced caching system for MANETs) and its weaknesses in terms of privacy to propose a privacy-preserving protocol to render such a caching system well protected against all kind of internal or external privacy breaches. We performed a detailed security and anonymity analysis of the design and evaluated the system through simulations using the network simulator NS-2. Experimental results prove that our design achieves anonymity with acceptable traffic and delay overhead.