Lightweight Encrytion Scheme against Flow Analysis in Multi-Hop Wireless Network Based on Network Coding

Abstract

Traffic analysis is a major issue faced in multi-hop wireless networks (MWN) in the case of privacy preservation. Network coding is essential in achieving greater capacity for any network and we extend this network coding for privacy preservation in multi-hop networks as it offers coding and mixing functions at intermediate nodes. Certain existing privacy preserving methods like onion routing can be employed here. Applying homomorphic encryption on Global Encoding Vectors(GEV’s), our method offers confidentiality and privacy preserving features. Only the sink has capability of decrypting the message content by inverting the GEV. Here, we focus on the privacy issue in order to prevent traffic analysis and flow tracing and achieve source anonymity in MWNs. Source anonymity refers to carrying the communication through the network maintaining the secrecy of the source node. Energy consumption when compared with the existing system was found to be reduced. Simulative evaluation by NS2 shows the efficiency of the system.

Keywords: MWN, Privacy preservation, NS2, GEV.