Protecting source–location privacy based on multirings in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Summary Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are expected to be widely deployed to collect data in military and civilian applications. Because of the open nature of WSNs, it is easy for an adversary to eavesdrop sensor communication and to trace packets, causing privacy concern for the sensor devices. The privacy issue, especially location privacy, can be critical for monitoring applications in WSNs. A unique case of location privacy is that of the sources, which are vulnerable of being captured and target attacks. In this paper, we propose a scheme to protect the source–location privacy based on a novel use of multiring topology. To achieve a uniformly distributed traffic pattern throughout the network, the source node selects two random rings each from its external rings and internal rings and a set of two random angles with a sum of 180 degrees for each packet. The packet is sent at one of the angles in each ring. Fake packets are also injected to provide path diversity and to increase attack time, which is defined as the time that the adversary takes to locate the source successfully. These techniques protect the source node from packet tracing attacks as well as traffic analysis attacks. Our analysis and simulations, performed in the NS2 simulator and MATLAB, demonstrate that our proposed scheme can provide better spatial traffic evenness and longer attack time, along with a modest increase of hop count and energy consumption.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Near-Optimal Source Location Privacy Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Some of these observations have been used in previous work, while others have not. For example, having the route approach the sink from a direction other than the one the source is in has been used in Phantom Routing [3] and Ring-based Routing [7]. We have also seen algorithms whose routes occasionally take the shortest path [26].…”

“…Several solutions aimed to improve the directed random walk phase of phantom routing, such as angle-based routing [6] which chooses the next node based on angles between key nodes. Other routing-based techniques involve routing in a ring around the sink before finally reaching it [7].…”

Deconstructing source location privacy-aware routing protocols

“…However, there have been many variations since such as GROW [24] which uses a bloom filter to prevent the walk doubling back on itself, techniques that allocate the phantom node in a specific area whilst avoiding direction information leakage [11] and angle-based techniques [21,23] which calculate angles between certain nodes to influence the direction of the walk. Other techniques have adapted the random walk such that it forms a ring around the source and messages are routed through the ring before being forwarded onwards to the source [10,25].…”

Understanding source location privacy protocols in sensor networks via perturbation of time series

“…There has been much work developing improved version of the directed random walk phase of phantom routing, such as GROW [6] which uses a bloom filter to prevent the walk doubling back on itself and angle-based techniques [7,8] which calculate angles between certain nodes to influence the direction of the walk. Other techniques have adapted the random walk such that it forms a ring around the source and messages are routed through the ring before being forwarded onwards to the source [9,10].…”