RAPID development of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) has stimulated numerous wireless applications that can be used in a wide number of areas such as commerce, emergency services, military, education, and entertainment. MANETs feature self-organizing and independent
infrastructures. Through traffic analysis, enemies may intercept transmitted packets, track our soldiers (i.e., nodes), attack the commander nodes, ALERT can be applied to different network models with various node movement patterns such as random. MANET deployed in a large field where geographic routing is used for node communication in order to reduce the communication latency. The location of a message’s sender may be revealed by merely exposing the transmission direction. The assumptions below apply to both inside and outside attackers. ALERT is distinguished by its low cost and anonymity protection for sources, destinations, and routes. It uses dynamic hierarchical zone partitions and random relay node selections to make it difficult for an intruder to detect the two endpoints and nodes en route. A packet in ALERT includes the source and destination zones rather than their positions to provide anonymity protection to the source and the destination. ALERT further strengthens the anonymity protection of source and destination by hiding the data initiator/receiver among a number of data initiators/ receivers. It has the “notify and go” mechanism for source anonymity, and uses local broadcasting for destination anonymity. ALERT has an efficient solution to counter intersection attacks. ALERT’s ability to fight against timing attacks is also analyzed.