On the tradeoff between privacy and energy in wireless sensor networks

Source location privacy is becoming an increasingly important property of some wireless sensor network applica- tions. The fake source technique has been proposed as an approach for handling the source location privacy problem in these situations. However, whilst the efficiency of the fake source techniques is well documented, there are several factors that limit the usefulness of current results: (i) the assumption that fake sources are known a priori, (ii) the selection of fake sources based on an prohibitively expensive pre-configuration phase and (iii) the lack of a commonly adopted attacker model. In this paper we address these limitations by investigating the efficiency of the fake source technique with respect to possible implementations, configurations and extensions that do not require a pre-configuration phase or a priori knowledge of fake sources. The results presented demonstrate that one possible implementation, in presence of a single attacker, can lead to a decrease in capture ratio of up to 60% when compared with a flooding baseline. In the presence of multiple attackers, the same implementation yields only a 30% decrease in capture ratio with respect to the same baseline. To address this problem we investigate a hybrid technique, known as phantom routing with fake sources, which achieves a corresponding 50% reduction in capture ratio

Preserving Source- and Sink-location Privacy in Sensor Networks

Protecting the location privacy of source and sink nodes in a sensor network is an important problem. Source-location privacy is to prevent event source tracking by adversaries and sink-location privacy is to protect sink nodes from adversaries who try to disrupt the sensor network. In this paper, we propose a constant-rate broadcast scheme for ensuring their location privacy. This scheme (1) equalizes traffic patterns of the sensor network to deal with eavesdropping and (2) minimizes the routing information of each sensor node to deal with node compromising. We further reduce the overhead of the proposed scheme by proposing a forwarder-driven broadcast (FdB) scheme that allows efficient multiple broadcasts with smaller buffer usage. Analysis and evaluation results show that FdB can support multiple broadcasts with small message delivery time and buffer usage.1111Ysciescopu

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Towards understanding source location privacy in wireless sensor networks through fake sources

Source location privacy is becoming an increasingly important property in wireless sensor network applications, such as asset monitoring. The original source location problem is to protect the location of a source in a wireless sensor network from a single distributed eavesdropper attack. Several techniques have been proposed to address the source location problem, where most of these apply some form of traffic analysis and engineering to provide enhanced privacy. One such technique, namely fake sources, has proved to be promising for providing source location privacy. Recent research has concentrated on investigating the efficiency of fake source approaches under various attacker models. In this paper, we (i) provide a novel formalisation of the source location privacy problem, (ii) prove the source location privacy problem to be NP-complete, and (iii) provide a heuristic that yields an optimal level of privacy under appropriate parameterisation. Crucially, the results presented show that fake sources can provide a high, sometimes optimal, level of privacy