Source-location Privacy In Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are usually used in large areas or areas that are hard for human beings to arrive. They can collect various kinds of physical information about the environment, thus being a hot research field in recent years. Their broad application potentials are attracting more and more attention from industry. In applications such as monitoring soldiers, precious resources and wild animals, how to protect location privacy of these sensitive objects is a very important research area. Aiming at packet trace-back attacking model, this paper proposes two defending strategies that are effective for preventing such local traffic analysis attacks.This paper proposes a source-location protecting strategy based on fake paths. This strategy takes advantage of the characteristic of broadcast, using special data packets to activate multiple fake paths that intersect with the shortest path. These fake paths may entice attackers to the wrong paths, therefore increasing the time needed for the attacker to locate source nodes. In this strategy, messages generated by the source nodes are routed along the shortest path, thus providing least message latency. Simulation results and theoretical analysis indicate that, compared to CEM, BFP can enhance safety period with the same energy cost.This paper proposes a probabilistic routing method with traffic density awareness ability—ECRF. ECRF uses random forwarding to select equal neighbors or near neighbors as the next-hop node of the messages with certain probability, therefore providing randomness to routing paths. Since TDA provides reasonable parameters for the random forwarding methods, the overall streams of the messages are directed to the areas with low traffic density. The simulation results show that, compared to Phantom Routing, ECRF can dramatically enhance safety period when introducing only a little more latency.First, this paper introduces the basic architecture, features and applications of Wireless Sensor Networks and analyzes the difficulties in security research of WSN. Then this paper sets forth some existing algorithms that can defend global or local traffic analysis attack and compares them in terms of energy control, safety effectiveness and difficulty to implement. After that, two strategies used to protect source location privacy against messages trace-back attack are brought forward, with simulation results acquired by OMNeT++ and theoretical analysis to validate their effectiveness. In the end, this paper concludes its contribution and future research direction.