We present a novel approach for analysing the propagation of data errors in software. The concept of error permeability is introduced as a basic nieasure upon which we dejine a set of related measures. These measures guide us in the process of analysing the vulnerability of software to find the modules that are most likely exposed to propagating errors. Based on the analysis perj4ormed with error permeability and its related measures, we describe how to select suitable locations for error detection niechanisms (EDM's) and error recovery mechanisms (ERM's). A method for experimental estimation of error permeability, based on fault injection, is described and the software of a real embedded control system analysed to show the type of results obtainable by the unalysis framework. The results show that the developed framework is very useful for analysing error propagation and software vulnerability, and for deciding where to place EDM's and ERM's.

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Copyright and reuse:The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher's statement:This is the accepted version of the following article: Jhumka, A., Bradbury, M. and Leeke, M. (2014), Fake source-based source location privacy in wireless sensor networks. Concurrency and Computation, which has been published in final form at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.3242 . A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. . For critical applications, dependability is important. In particular, privacy, which can generally be described as the guarantee that information can only be observed or deciphered by those intended to observe or decipher it [3], will be an important property. As WSNs operate in a broadcast medium, attackers can easily intercept messages and subsequently launch attacks. The security threats that exist for WSNs can be classified along two dimensions, content-based privacy threats and context-based privacy threats. The privacy threats against the content relate to threats that are based on the contents of messages, i.e., the attacks are against the data generated by the higher network layers -data generated either at the application level (values sensed by sensors) or lower-layer levels (e.g., time-stamps). In such attacks, attackers try to capture data to learn about the status of the network so that relevant attacks can be launched. Much research has addressed content-based attacks [4]. On the other hand, context-based privacy threats are those Context is a multi-attribute concept that captures several aspects, some of which are environmental, associated with sensed data such as location, and time so that the proper semantics is given to the data. While content-based threats have been widely addressed [4], context-based threats are becoming increasingly popular. For content-based threats, nodes launching attacks are often modelled as Byzantine nodes [5] [6], with cryptographic techniques often being used to address these problems [4] [5] [7]. However, cryptographic techniques cannot help with handling contextbased threats....