Phantom walkabouts: A customisable source location privacy aware routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Source location privacy (SLP) is an important property for a large class of security-critical wireless sensor network (WSN) applications such as monitoring and tracking. In the seminal work on SLP, phantom routing was proposed as a viable approach to address SLP. However, recent work has shown some limitations of phantom routing such as poor data yield and low SLP. In this paper, we propose phantom walkabouts, a novel and more general version of phantom routing, which performs phantom routes of variable lengths. Through extensive simulations, we show that phantom walkabouts provides high SLP level than phantom routing under specific network configuration. KEYWORDSbiased random walk, phantom routing, phantom walkabouts, source location privacy, wireless sensor networks INTRODUCTIONA wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a number of tiny devices, known as sensor nodes, that can sense different attributes of the environment and use radio signals to communicate among themselves. WSNs have enabled the development of many novel applications, including asset monitoring, 1 target tracking, 2 and environment control 3 among others, with low levels of intrusiveness. They are also expected to be deployed in safety and security-critical systems, including military 4 and medical services. 5 The communication protocols used in the WSNs must therefore meet a set of stringent security and privacy requirements, dependent on the application.Threats to privacy in monitoring applications can be considered along two dimensions, ie, (1) content-based threats and (2) context-based threats. Content-based privacy threats relate to use of the content of the messages broadcast by sensor nodes, such as an attacker gaining the ability to read an eavesdropped encrypted message. There has been much research addressing the issue of providing content privacy, eg, SPINS, 6 with most efforts in this area focusing on the use of cryptographic techniques. On the other hand, context-based privacy threats focus on the context in which messages are broadcast and how information can be observed or inferred by attackers. Context is a multi-attribute concept that encompasses situational aspects of broadcast messages, including environmental and temporal information.It is often desirable for the source of sensed information to be kept private in a WSN. For example, in a military application, a soldier transmitting messages may unintentionally disclose their location, even when encryption is used. Another example is during the monitoring of endangered species where poachers may be tempted to infer the location of the animal to capture it. Real world examples include monitoring badgers 2 and the WWF's Wildlife Crime Technology Report, 7 both of which would likely benefit from a context-based security measure. In this paper, we focus on protecting the source location.Techniques that protect this source location are said to provide source location privacy (SLP). SLP is important in many application domains, though it is of utmost concern in security-critica...

Novel Approaches to Realize the Reliability of Location Privacy Protocols in Monitoring Wireless Networks

“…Some of the recently proposed SLP protocols include the two-level phantom with a pursue ring protocol [12], unified single and multi-path routing protocol [13], dynamic multipath routing protocol [17], grid-based single phantom node protocol [34], data dissemination protocol [37], and the protocol based on anonymity cloud [43]. Other recently proposed SLP protocols include the cloud-based with multi-sinks protocol [14], protocol based on phantom nodes, rings, and fake paths [16], phantom walkabouts protocol [18], grid-based dual phantom node protocol [34], two-level phantom with a backbone route protocol [12], probabilistic routing protocol [44], and the circular trap protocol [45].…”

“…Therefore, it is important to ensure energy-efficient communications and location privacy protection in WSNs [13], [16]- [18]. Moreover, the dynamicity of WSNs is greater as sensor nodes fail more often due to the limited battery power and harsh application environments [19].…”

Secure Routing Protocols for Source Node Privacy Protection in Multi-Hop Communication Wireless Networks

“…The phantom routing strategy has been widely explored in the literature, and it has been adopted in many existing protocols. Examples of routing protocols which adopt phantom routing include the trace cost based source location privacy protection scheme [9], phantom walkabouts routing protocol [13], the phantom routing with locational angle [22], and the energy efficient privacy preserved routing algorithm [23]. Similarly, the phantom routing strategy is adopted in the multiple-phantom nodes routing scheme [24], the grid-based single phantom node and grid-based dual phantom node source location privacy protection schemes [25], the self-adjusting directed random walk approach [26], and the pseudo normal distribution-based phantom routing protocol [27].…”

“…Then, the packets are transmitted from the phantom node to the destination sink node through flooding, single-path routing, or some alternative strategies [2,12]. The phantom routing strategy is simple and offers low SLP protection when used in its simple form [13]. In the fake packet routing strategy, fake sources are designed to mimic the functions of the real source nodes.…”

“…However, to effectively obfuscate an adversary, the protocols often distribute a large amount of fake packet traffic in the network. Consequently, the protocols incur exhaustive energy consumption, routing congestion problems, packet collisions, and packet loss events [2,13,[17][18][19]. As a result, the packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end delay (EED) performance of the protocols are affected [11].…”