An Enhanced Source Location Privacy Protection Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks using Randomized Routes

Abstract

Asset monitoring and tracking is an important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Tiny sensors collect information about the assets and convey this message to the base station using multi-hop routing techniques. For instance, in habitat monitoring application, the nodes collect details of the endangered species and report to the central controller, i.e., the base station. Preserving the privacy of these assets from the attackers is imperative. An attacker may backtrack the message flow and eventually capture the asset. In this work, we aim to improve the source location privacy, which is measured by the safety period, by designing a new routing technique where randomized routes in the whole network are generated distributively between the node of origin and the base station. The diversity of the routing paths will lengthen the backtracking period of the attacker and thus increase the safety period. The key feature of the solution is that it achieves improved source location privacy without hampering the network lifetime. Unlike the existing solutions, the proposed technique does not employ any fake sources that decreases the network lifetime due to generation of large number of dummy packets. The solution performs quite well even when the asset is near the base station. The proposed method is analysed and compared with forward random walk and phantom single path routing schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves improved privacy level with more uncertainty in the routing paths than the current techniques.

KEYWORDS:

• Backtracking
• Entropy
• Randomization
• Safety period
• Source location privacy
• Wireless sensor networks

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manjula Raja

Manjula Raja did her BE in Electronics and Communications Engineering, and M Tech in Computer Network Engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum, Karnataka, India, in the year 2002 and 2006, respectively. She was a faculty member in Ballari Institute of Technology and Management (BITM), Ballari. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in the department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, India. Her research interests include security and privacy in wireless sensor networks. She has few publication in various national and international conferences.

E-mail: [email protected]

Raja Datta

Raja Datta is a professor in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. He is also presently the professor in-charge of Technology Telecom Centre of IIT Kharagpur. He has to his credit more than 75 publications in international journals and conferences and is the member of editorial boards and reviewers of several international journals. He handles a number of national level sponsored projects funded by Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and Department of Information Technology (DIT), Government of India, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), and Indian Railways. He was also involved in consultancy projects with Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and Haldia Dock Complex. He is a senior member of IEEE and was the secretary, vice chair and chairman of the IEEE Kharagpur Section in the years 2012, 2013 and 2014, respectively. During his tenure, IEEE Kharagpur Section won the Best Small Section award in Region 10. His main research interests include delay tolerant networks, internet of things, mobile ad-hoc networks, sensor networks, inter planetary networks, optical networks, operating systems and distributed processing.

E-mail: [email protected]