Mirage: Private, Mobility-based Routing for Censorship Evasion
Zachary Ratliff
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 1 · Cross-Domain Attacks
When governments shut down the internet to suppress communication, **mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs)** offer a lifeline -- routing messages between people via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct based on physical proximity. But existing protocols that use historical mobility patterns to improve routing efficiency inadvertently leak users' location histories to other participants. This talk introduces **Mirage**, a differentially private routing protocol for **human networks (human-nets)** that achieves comparable message delivery rates and network efficiency to non-private protocols while providing formal privacy guarantees against **statistical disclosure attacks**.
AI review
A differentially private routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks in censorship scenarios. The statistical disclosure attack against PPBR is a valid contribution, but the defensive system is primarily privacy engineering with no offensive security content, no exploitation, and limited relevance to the security practitioner audience.