Refining traffic information for analysis using evidence theory

Anonymous communication is important and desirable in a wide range of networking systems to guarantee secure and private communications. This feature is especially important in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) where the communication channel is publicly open and the sessions are vulnerable to passive attacks. The fact that MANETs are mostly used in crucial environments such as military usage and disaster rescue emphasizes this importance. In our previous work [1], [2], a theoretic approach and its evaluation methods were developed to model the anonymity performance. The corresponding methods for handling localization errors and scalability issues were also proposed. However, an effective approach to handle the fuzzy information acquired from the network needs to be further developed. To this end, we develop a comprehensive evidence based method to handle the information that a monitoring system can acquire in realistic model and the corresponding analysis approach to process the various evidences from multiple sources. The purpose of this work is to evaluate how much information regarding the anonymous communication is leaked into the wireless channel. The evaluation of the proposed method shows a satisfactory performance in terms of accuracy in reconstructing the anonymous communication patterns in real-world scenarios.