Energy-Aware Cross-Layer Technique for Countering Traffic Analysis Attacks on Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

The vital role of a base station (BS) in a wireless sensor network (WSN) has made it a favorable target in hostile environments. Despite attempts to physically make the BS hidden to prying eyes, traffic analysis would give an adversary insight into the network topology and the BS whereabouts. Evidence Theory (ET) is a prominent methodology for performing such an analysis. Unfortunately, all existing countermeasures not only overlook patterns of energy usage in WSNs, but also impose untamed overhead that shortens the WSN lifetime. In this paper, we first propose a novel energy-aware and multi-zone scheme to significantly reduce the overhead of countermeasures on highly overburdened nodes in the BS proximity, and hence significantly improve the WSN lifespan. We also show how our proposed scheme improves resilience against ET via diminishing the collected evidence by an adversary. We then propose a novel cross-layer technique that exploits transmission range adjustment to confuse the adversary about the data paths. This results in a versatile and effective countermeasure that significantly improves anonymity of the BS. The performance is validated through extensive simulation experiments.