Research On Node Location Protection And Self-healing Techniques In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in a variety of military andcivilian applications. However, due to the limitations in energy, storage andcommunication capabilities of the distributed sensors, wireless sensor networks arevulnerable to various attacks. Recent research shows that attackers cannot only infervaluable location-related information by locating some important nodes (e.g. sourcenode, base station), but also obtain nodes’ secrets through a subsequentcompromising process. Once a node is compromised, its self-healing abilitybecomes the key indicator of the network’s reliability and survivability. Based onabove reasons, in this dissertation, we investigate anti-location techniques, and nodeself-healing techniques to deal with circumstances where nodes are alreadycompromised in WSNs.First, phantom sources generated by existing source-location protection protocolshave a probability of converging in certain sub-areas, which make them ineffective inmisleading attackers’tracing process. Therefore, a new source-location protectionprotocol, PUSBRF (Source-Location Privacy Preservation Protocol UsingSource-Based Restricted Floodin), is proposed. PUSBRF generates geographicallydiversified phantom sources launched by the source through a restricted floodingprocess. On this basis, an enhancement protocol, EPUSBRF (EnhancementSource-Location Privacy Preservation Protocol Using Source-Based RestrictedFlooding), is further proposed. EPUSBRF avoids message transmission within thesurrounding area of the source node, so that the the source-location privacy isprotected.Second, we investigate the base station location protection problem from bothattack and defense sides. Two base station location attacks, PAS (Parent-based AttackScheme) and TP-PAS (Two-phase Parent-based Attack Scheme), are proposed thatcan effectively locate the base station under parent-based routing protocols. In orderto protect base station from these attacks, we further present two new protocols, CB(Child-Based Routing Protocol) and PF (Parent-Free Routing Protocol). CB and PFcan provide secure routing against PAS and TP-PAS by transmitting messages usingchild set and onion messages respectively.Third, existing anonymous communication protocols for wireless sensor networks cannot achieve source anonymity, base station anonymity, andcommunication-relationship anonymity at the same time. Therefore, attackers cantrace the source node or the base station by analyzing identities from messages. Wethus propose an efficient anonymous communication protocol EAC (EfficientAnonymous Communication Protocol). By consisting of five secure schemes:anonymous data sending, anonymous data forwarding, anonymous broadcast,anonymous acknowledgement, and anonymous node addition, EAC can provideefficient anonymity.Fourth, considering the problems with existing node self-healing protocols inwireless sensor networks, such as, inability in providing sustainable node self-healingability, high computation cost and incapability in dealing with real situations likenode failures and message losses, an efficient and sustainable self-healing protocolESSH (Efficient and Sustainable Self-Healing Protocol) is proposed. ESSH uses anew random data generation scheme to provide unpredictable random data, so thatthe compromised nodes can continuously heal themselves with high probability.Compared with existing protocols, the hash functions and symmetric cryptographyused by ESSH can significantly reduce the corresponding computation cost.Furthermore, in ESSH, a simple random data compensation scheme is proposed,whereby problems like message losses and node failures are better solved for realnetwork situations.