Protecting Source Location Privacy in IoT-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks: The Case of Multiple Assets

Abstract

A major limitation to the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in asset monitoring applications is the security and privacy concerns, particularly the privacy of source location information. In this paper, we develop two phantom routingbased solutions to provide source location privacy for the case of multi-source/asset scenario-the case that has received very little attention in the literature. The idea of phantom routing is to relay the packets to a distant node in a random fashion to obfuscate the traffic flows and confuse the attacker. The first technique PRBRW uses a combination of backward random walk and a greedy forwarding approach to route the packets to the base station (BS). Although the first approach has better performance improvements in terms of capture ratio and safetyperiod it hampers the lifetime of the network and has a poor entropy metric. To better this problem, an improved phantom routing scheme PRLPRW is proposed. The second technique has three phases: pure random walk, L-walk, and greedy walk. This technique performs well in terms of capture-ratio, safety period, and entropy metrics. The improvement in network lifetime is 10-folds and entropy is 477-folds when compared with PRBRW. The performance is evaluated using the developed analytical models and compared with the base-line protection-less scheme SRP. It is observed that PRBRW and PRLPRW respectively have 60-and 73-fold improvement in terms of capture ratio when compared with SPR. Whereas existing PRPRW and FRW techniques respectively have only 54-and 34-fold improvements.

Hop Threshold-based Random Walk Routing for Improved Privacy and Network Lifetime in WSNs

“…At first we compare our technique with Shortest Path Routing (SPR) and then with the other similar techniques (i.e., random walkbased SLP techniques) to evaluate its performance. The comparisons are done with SPR, SLP-R [7] and PRLPRW [9]. The performance metrics used for evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed solution are explained in Sec.…”

“…Two solutions named PRBRW and PRLPRW have been proposed in [9]. The first approach sends the packets in the reverse direction followed by the greedy approach to reach the BS.…”

“…In [8] for enhancing the privacy of the source, researchers presented a routing technique that concatenates arcs from several rings around the sink to confuse the adversary when the source node is near the BS (also known as sink). The work in [9] proposes two SLP solutions namely Phantom Routing-based Backward Random walk (PRBR) and Phantom Routing-based L-Path Random walk (PRLPRW). However, the proposed solutions so far do not solve entirely the imbalance between the safety period and network lifetime (NLT).…”

Silence is Golden: A Source Location Privacy Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Silent Nodes

“…Other algorithms use random walk techniques to provide SLP such as forward random walk [15] and two-level phantom routing using a second phantom node [16]. However, this class of solution has a number of weaknesses that can lead to a low level of SLP due to the reuse of routing paths and exposure of direction information [17].…”

“…( 13) break (14) case SourceToSinkAn dB ack (15) IsSilentState ⟵ SourceToSinkAndBack(SeqNo, SDB). ( 16) break (17) if IsSilentStatethen (18) pass ► Discard the received message ( 19) else (20) BCAST Normal 〈SeqNo, SDB, . .…”