Source-location privacy in energy-constrained sensor network routing

Abstract

As sensor-driven applications become increasingly integrated into our lives, issues related to sensor privacy will become increasingly important. Although many privacy-related issues can be addressed by security mechanisms, one sensor network privacy issue that cannot be adequately addressed by network security is confidentiality of the source sensor's location. In this paper, we focus on protecting the source's location by introducing suitable modifications to sensor routing protocols to make it difficult for an adversary to backtrack to the origin of the sensor communication. In particular, we focus on the class of flooding protocols. While developing and evaluating our privacy-aware routing protocols, we jointly consider issues of location-privacy as well as the amount of energy consumed by the sensor network. Motivated by the observations, we propose a flexible routing strategy, known as phantom routing, which protects the source's location. Phantom routing is a two-stage routing scheme that first consists of a directed walk along a random direction, followed by routing from the phantom source to the sink. Our investigations have shown that phantom routing is a powerful technique for protecting the location of the source during sensor transmissions.

On the Use of Fake Sources for Source Location Privacy: Trade-Offs Between Energy and Privacy

“…The problem of source location privacy first appeared around 2004 [7] [15]. Since then, the problem has been addressed using a variety of attacker models and assumptions.…”

“…These varied attacker models and assumptions have led to the development of many solutions and techniques for enhancing source location privacy. Ozturk et al [15] investigated the privacy imparted by flooding, and several other techniques such as fake source and phantom routing. A similar investigation was performed by Kamat et al [7].…”

Decorrelating wireless sensor network traffic to inhibit traffic analysis attacks

“…Preserving source-location privacy in WSNs was proposed by C. Ozturk et.al. [15]. This work proposes randomization techniques such as fake packets, persistent fake sources, and a random walk to hide the location of the source of data packet from discovery.…”

An Active Global Attack Model for Sensor Source Location Privacy: Analysis and Countermeasures

“…In an asset monitoring network [1], [2], when an endangered animal (e.g., panda) appears in the network, an event notification message will be delivered to the base station (BS). A nonconforming hunter may identify the source location and capture the animal by monitoring network traffic.…”

“…In an active local attack model 1 [1], [2], [3], an attacker's hearing range is assumed to be comparable to that of regular sensors. The attacker tries to trace back to the real source in a hop-by-hop fashion, given that the real event source emits packets continuously for a period of time.…”