Abstract: Dynamic topology of MANETs make very challenging issue for providing anonymity. There have been many anonymous routing protocols available for providing anonymity and location privacy. Such as AASR satisfy the requirement but packet delay is higher. Multicast routing is essential for ad hoc applications when they operating as groups, privacy preservation is a critical issue in such scenarios. In this paper, we propose an Anonymous Secure Multicast Routing (ASMR) for manet. In this approach, the route request (RREQ) packets are authenticated by a group signature, to protect against active attacks without showing the node identities and for reducing the overhead of packet delay, trust based routing is used there by less trusted nodes are given lesser number of self encrypted parts of a message. This makes it very difficult for malicious nodes to attain the minimum information to break through the encryption strategy. Our protocol extends anonymous routing from unicast communication to multicast and also provides additional security properties.

Keywords: Anonymous routing, Multicasting, Header selection, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs).