Distributed Privacy-Protecting DTN Routing: Concealing the Information Indispensable in Routing

Nodes in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) rely on routing utilities (e.g., probabilities of meeting nodes) to decide the packet forwarder. As the utilities reflect user privacy, nodes may be reluctant to disclose such information directly. Therefore, we propose a distributed strategy to protect the aforementioned private information in utility-based DTN routing algorithms while still guarantying the correctness of packet forwarding, namely meeting Relationship Anonymity (ReHider). We also present an enhanced version that can better prevent certain malicious behaviors (probing attack and brute-force attack). Initial analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.