Source location anonymity for sensor networks,”

Abstract-Motivated by applications like sensor, peer to peer networks there has been growing interest in monitoring large scale distributed systems. In these applications, source location anonymity is an attractive and critical security property. Most of prior works assumed a weak adversary model where the adversary sees only local network traffic, but here we consider source anonymity against a global eavesdropper. Attaining location unobservability under global attacker is very difficult and expensive to achieve, because sensor networks are very limited in resources. In this work we propose a distributed algorithm to mix real event traffic with carefully chosen dummy traffic to hide the real event traffic pattern. We assume that we have fixed amount of resources to send dummy traffic and we try to share it among sensors so as to maximize the degree of anonymity of the system. Through simulation, we illustrate that the proposed technique is efficient in protecting location information from the eavesdropper

A Security Measure That Quantify The Anonymity Of Different Systems

The basis ambiguity difficulty in wireless sensor networks is the trouble of studying methods that provide time and position privacy for events reported by sensor nodes. Time and location privacy will be used interchangeably with source anonymity throughout the paper. The source anonymity problem has been drawing growing research concentration recently the source anonymity problem has been addressed under two different types of adversary’s namely local and global adversaries. A local adversary is definite to be an adversary having limited mobility and inequitable view of the network traffic. Routing based methods have been shown to be efficient in hiding the locations of reported events against local adversaries. A global adversary is defined to be an adversary with capacity to check the traffic of the entire network e.g. coordinating adversaries spatially distributed over the network. Against global adversaries routing based techniques are known to be unproductive in cover up location information in event-triggered transmission

Source Anonymity in WSNs against Global Adversary Utilizing Low Transmission Rates with Delay Constraints

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are deployed for many applications such as tracking and monitoring of endangered species, military applications, etc. which require anonymity of the origin, known as Source Location Privacy (SLP). The aim in SLP is to prevent unauthorized observers from tracing the source of a real event by analyzing the traffic in the network. Previous approaches to SLP such as Fortified Anonymous Communication Protocol (FACP) employ transmission of real or fake packets in every time slot, which is inefficient. To overcome this shortcoming, we developed three different techniques presented in this paper. Dummy Uniform Distribution (DUD), Dummy Adaptive Distribution (DAD) and Controlled Dummy Adaptive Distribution (CAD) were developed to overcome the anonymity problem against a global adversary (which has the capability of analyzing and monitoring the entire network). Most of the current techniques try to prevent the adversary from perceiving the location and time of the real event whereas our proposed techniques confuse the adversary about the existence of the real event by introducing low rate fake messages, which subsequently lead to location and time privacy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed techniques provide reasonable delivery ratio, delay, and overhead of a real event's packets while keeping a high level of anonymity. Three different analysis models are conducted to verify the performance of our techniques. A visualization of the simulation data is performed to confirm anonymity. Further, neural network models are developed to ensure that the introduced techniques preserve SLP. Finally, a steganography model based on probability is implemented to prove the anonymity of the techniques.https://doi.org/10.3390/s1607095

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

Energy efficient privacy preserved data gathering in wireless sensor networks having multiple sinks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) generally have a many-to-one structure so that event information flows from sensors to a unique sink. In recent WSN applications, many-tomany structures are evolved due to need for conveying collected event information to multiple sinks at the same time. This study proposes an anonymity method bases on k-anonymity for preventing record disclosure of collected event information in WSNs. Proposed method takes the anonymity requirements of multiple sinks into consideration by providing different levels of privacy for each destination sink. Attributes, which may identify of an event owner, are generalized or encrypted in order to meet the different anonymity requirements of sinks. Privacy guaranteed event information can be multicasted to all sinks instead of sending to each sink one by one. Since minimization of energy consumption is an important design criteria for WSNs, our method enables us to multicast the same event information to multiple sinks and reduce energy consumption

Privacy Implications of In-Network Aggregation Mechanisms for VANETs

Research on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is active and ongoing. Proposed applications range from safety applications, and traffic efficiency applications to entertainment applications. Common to many applications is the need to disseminate possibly privacy-sensitive information, such as location and speed information, over larger distances. In-network aggregation is a promising technology that can help to make such privacy-sensitive information only available in the direct vicinity of vehicles instead of communicating it over larger areas. Further away, only aggregated information that is not privacy-relevant anymore will be known. At the same time, aggregation mechanisms help to cope with the limited available wireless bandwidth. However, the exact privacy properties of aggregation mechanisms have still not been thoroughly researched. In this paper, we propose a metric to measure privacy enhancements provided by in-network aggregation and use it to compare existing schemes

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio