Protecting Receiver-Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Due to the open nature of a sensor network, it is relatively easy for an adversary to eavesdrop and trace packet movement in the network in order to capture the receiver physically. After studying the adversary's behavior patterns, we present countermeasures to this problem. We propose a locationprivacy routing protocol (LPR) that is easy to implement and provides path diversity. Combining with fake packet injection, LPR is able to minimize the traffic direction information that an adversary can retrieve from eavesdropping. By making the directions of both incoming and outgoing traffic at a sensor node uniformly distributed, the new defense system makes it very hard for an adversary to perform analysis on locally gathered information and infer the direction to which the receiver locates. We evaluate our defense system based on three criteria: delivery time, privacy protection strength, and energy cost. The simulation results show that LPR with fake packet injection is capable of providing strong protection for the receiver's location privacy. Under similar energy cost, the safe time of the receiver provided by LPR is much longer than other methods, including Phantom routing [1] and DEFP [2]. The performance of our system can be tuned through a couple of parameters that determine the tradeoff between energy cost and the strength of location-privacy protection.

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

“…In their schemes, secure multi-path routing to multiple destination base stations is designed to provide intrusion tolerance against isolation of base station and anti-traffic analysis is proposed to disguise the location of base station. [18] proposes a locationprivacy routing protocol that provides path diversity combined with fake packet injection to protect receiver-location privacy.…”

Location Privacy against Traffic Analysis Attacks through Mobile Sinks using Trust Value Computing

“…DEFP [3] is a parent-child routing which support fake packet injection mechanism to protect the sink. The real direction of packet flows may be hidden from the adversary by injecting fake packets to the nodes and making the direction of ingoing and outgoing packets uniformly distributed.LPR(Location Privacy Routing) [4] is another routing technique that is based on fake packet injection. GROW(Greedy random Walk) [5] is another source location protection technique based on the method of random routing.…”

From nowhere to somewhere: Protecting end-to-end location privacy in wireless sensor networks

“…They have also proposed in [15] to defend against the traffic analysis attacks by using multi-path routing and fake message injection to hide the location of the base station. LPR [16] provides the receiver location privacy against the packet tracing attacks. In LPR, the message flows incoming from and outgoing to a sensor node are uniformly distributed, which makes it difficult for an adversary to ascertain the direction of the sink.…”