Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETS) are very useful in establishing communication among a group of soldiers for tactical operations. Setting up of a fixed infrastructure for communication among a group of soldiers in enemy territories or inhospitable terrains may not be possible. As the military applications require very secure communication at any cost, the vehicle mounted nodes can be assumed to be very sophisticated and powerful. Anonymous routing protocols that hide node identities and routes from outside observers in order to provide anonymity protection are used. The existing anonymous routing protocols rely on either hop-by-hop encryption or redundant traffic, which either generate high cost or cannot provide full anonymity protection to data sources, destinations and routes. ALERT protocol offers high anonymity protection to sources, destinations and routes. However, it does not serve as bulletproof to adversaries. So, in addition we use a key exchange mechanism, that verifies the identities of the random forwarders that act as temporary source for the transmission dynamically, hence the transmission becomes more reliable and effective. The protocol achieves anonymity of source, destination and route at lower cost. We theoretically analyse the protocol in terms of anonymity, average delay and packet delivery ratio.
