Supporting Business Privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the pervasive use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) within commercial environments, business privacy leakage due to the exposure of sensitive information transmitted in a WSN has become a major issue for enterprises. We examine business privacy protection in the application of WSNs. We propose a business privacy-protection system (BPS) that is modeled as a hierarchical profile in order to filter sensitive information with respect to enterprise-specified privacy requirements. The BPS aims at solving a tradeoff between metrics that are defined to estimate the utility of information and the business privacy risk. We design profile, risk assessment, and filtration agents to implement the BPS based on multiagent technology. The effectiveness of our proposed BPS is validated by experiments

Fortified Anonymous Communication Protocol for Location Privacy in WSN: A Modular Approach

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of many hosts called sensors. These sensors can sense a phenomenon (motion, temperature, humidity, average, max, min, etc.) and represent what they sense in a form of data. There are many applications for WSNs including object tracking and monitoring where in most of the cases these objects need protection. In these applications, data privacy itself might not be as important as the privacy of source location. In addition to the source location privacy, sink location privacy should also be provided. Providing an efficient end-to-end privacy solution would be a challenging task to achieve due to the open nature of the WSN. The key schemes needed for end-to-end location privacy are anonymity, observability, capture likelihood, and safety period. We extend this work to allow for countermeasures against multi-local and global adversaries. We present a network model protected against a sophisticated threat model: passive /active and local/multi-local/global attacks. This work provides a solution for end-to-end anonymity and location privacy as well. We will introduce a framework called fortified anonymous communication (FAC) protocol for WSN.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s15030582

Source Anonymity against Global Adversary in WSNs Using Dummy Packet Injections: A Survey

Source anonymity in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) becomes a real concern in several applications such as tracking and monitoring. A global adversary that has sophisticated resources, high computation and full view of the network is an obvious threat to such applications. The network and applications need to be protected and secured to provide the expected outcome. Source anonymity is one of the fundamental WSNs security issues. It is all about preventing the adversary from reaching the origin by analyzing the traffic of the network. There are many methods to provide source anonymity, which is also known as Source Location Privacy (SLP). One of these methods is based on dummy packets. The basic notion is to inject the network with dummy packets to confuse the adversary about the location of the transmitting source node. This paper provides a survey of protocols for anonymity that use dummy packet injections. We discuss each technique from the point of their advantages and disadvantages. Further, We provide a comparison for the most promising techniques provided in the literature which use dummy packet injections. A comparison for the adversary assumptions and capabilities will be provided as well.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/electronics710025

Fortified End-to-End Location Privacy and Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Modular Approach

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of many hosts called sensors. These sensors can sense a phenomenon (motion, temperature, humidity, average, max, min, etc.) and represent what they sense in a form of data. There are many applications for WSNs; including object tracking and monitoring where in most of the cases these objects need protection. In these applications, data privacy itself might not be as important as the privacy of source location. In addition to the source location privacy, sink location privacy should also be provided. Providing an efficient end-to-end privacy solution would be a challenging task to achieve due to the open nature of the WSN. The key schemes needed for end-to-end location privacy are anonymity, observability, capture likelihood, and safety period. We extend this work to allow for countermeasures against multi-local and global adversaries. We present a network model that is protected against a sophisticated threat model: passive /active and local/multi-local/global attacks. This work provides a solution for end-to-end anonymity and location privacy as well. We will introduce a framework called fortified anonymous communication (FAC) protocol for WSN

Location privacy and resilience in wireless sensor networks querying

Due to the wireless nature of communication in sensor networks, the communication patterns between sensors could be leaked regardless of the adoption of encryption mechanisms those would just protect the message content. However, communication patterns could provide valuable information to an adversary. For instance, this is the case when sensors reply to a query broadcast by a Base Station (BS); an adversary eavesdropping the communication traffic could realize which sensors are the ones that possibly match the query (that is, the ones that replied). This issue is complicated by the severe resource constrained environment WSNs are subject to, that call for efficient and scalable solutions. In this paper, we have addressed the problem of preserving the location privacy of the sensors of a wireless sensor network when they send a reply to a query broadcast by the BS. In particular, we deal with one of the worst scenarios for privacy: When sensors are queried by a BS to provide the MAX of their stored readings. We provide a probabilistic and scalable protocol to compute the MAX that enjoys the following features: (i) it guarantees the location privacy of the sensors replying to the query; (ii) it is resilient to an active adversary willing to alter the readings sent by the sensors; and, (iii) it allows to trade-off the accuracy of the result with (a small) overhead increase. Finally, extensive simulations support our analysis, showing the quality of our proposal. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Source location privacy in wireless sensor networks under practical scenarios : routing protocols, parameterisations and trade-offs

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been applied across a spectrum of application domains, source location privacy (SLP) has emerged as a significant issue, particularly in security-critical situations. In seminal work on SLP, several protocols were proposed as viable approaches to address the issue of SLP. However, most state-of-the-art approaches work under specific network assumptions. For example, phantom routing, one of the most popular routing protocols for SLP, assumes a single source. On the other hand, in practical scenarios for SLP, this assumption is not realistic, as there will be multiple data sources. Other issues of practical interest include network configurations. Thus, thesis addresses the impact of these practical considerations on SLP. The first step is the evaluation of phantom routing under various configurations, e.g., multiple sources and network configurations. The results show that phantom routing does not scale to handle multiple sources while providing high SLP at the expense of low messages yield. Thus, an important issue arises as a result of this observation that the need for a routing protocol that can handle multiple sources. As such, a novel parametric routing protocol is proposed, called phantom walkabouts, for SLP for multi-source WSNs. A large-scale experiments are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of phantom walkabouts. The main observation is that phantom walkabouts can provide high level of SLP at the expense of energy and/or data yield. To deal with these trade-offs, a framework that allows reasoning about trade-offs needs to develop. Thus, a decision theoretic methodology is proposed that allows reasoning about these trade-offs. The results showcase the viability of this methodology via several case studies