Decorrelating wireless sensor network traffic to inhibit traffic analysis attacks

Abstract

Typical packet traffic in a sensor network reveals pronounced patterns that allow an adversary analyzing packet traffic to deduce the location of a base station. Once discovered, the base station can be destroyed, rendering the entire sensor network inoperative, since a base station is a central point of data collection and hence failure. This paper investigates a suite of decorrelation countermeasures aimed at disguising the location of a base station against traffic analysis attacks. A set of basic countermeasures is described, including hop-by-hop reencryption of the packet to change its appearance, imposition of a uniform packet sending rate, and removal of correlation between a packet's receipt time and its forwarding time. More sophisticated countermeasures are described that introduce randomness into the path taken by a packet. Packets may also fork into multiple fake paths to further confuse an adversary. A technique is introduced to create multiple random areas of high communication activity called hot spots to deceive an adversary as to the true location of the base station. The effectiveness of these countermeasures against traffic analysis attacks is demonstrated analytically and via simulation using three evaluation criteria: total entropy of the network, total overhead/energy consumed, and the ability to frustrate heuristic-based search techniques to locate a base station.

On Estimating the Topology of an Adversarial Wireless Network

“…Taking the problem of non-conforming behavior further, it is possible to imagine that an adversarial network would deliberately take action to frustrate the estimation problem, as pointed out in [8]. However, we conjecture that any such action would degrade the performance of the adversarial network.…”

“…This approach was previously taken in [8], which was mostly concerned with identifying a base station (which we refer to as a data sink). Other approaches can be taken, such as observing the total data rate through each node, with the largest data rate most likely corresponding to the data sink [9].…”

Privacy preservation for WSN: A Survey

“…Different techniques [26,27] are proposed to counter the traffic analysis attacks. The rate monitoring attack can be partially prevented by the multiple parents routing technique since traffic spreads along multiple paths.…”

Security and Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Concealed Data Aggregation (CDA) (Ferrer. (2002)) is a type of PH scheme, which conceals the process of data aggregation in WSN by using Domingo-Ferrer's (DF) approach ( Deng, et al (2006)). In this protocol, each sensor node splits its data into d parts (d ≥ 2), encrypts them by using a public key and transmits them to the aggregator node.…”