| Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can provide the world with a technology for real-time event monitoring for both military and civilian applications. One of the primary concerns that hinder the successful deployment of wireless sensor networks is source-location privacy. The privacy of the source location is vital and highly jeopardized by the usage of wireless communications. While message content privacy can be ensured through message encryption, it is much more difficult to adequately address the source-location privacy. For WSNs, source-location privacy service is further complicated by the fact that sensors consist of low-cost and energy efficient radio devices. Therefore, using computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms (such as public-key cryptosystems) and large scale broadcasting-based protocols are not suitable for WSNs.;Many protocols have been proposed to provide source-location privacy but most of them are based on public-key cryptosystems, while others are either energy inefficient or have certain security flaws. In this thesis, after analyzing the security weakness of the existing scheme, we propose three routing-based source-location privacy schemes. The first scheme routes each message to a randomly selected intermediate node before it is transmitted to the SINK node. However, this scheme can only provide local source-location privacy. In the second scheme, a network mixing ring (NMR) is proposed to provide network-level source-location privacy. The third scheme achieve network-level source-location privacy through a technique we call the Sink Toroidal Region (STaR) routing. For each of these routing schemes, both security analysis and simulation results show that the proposed schemes are secure and efficient. |
