An Enhanced Source Location Privacy Protection Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks using Randomized Routes
Article, IETE Journal of Research, 2018, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
Asset monitoring and tracking is an important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Tiny sensors collect information about the assets and convey this message to the base station using multi-hop routing techniques. For instance, in habitat monitoring application, the nodes collect details of the endangered species and report to the central controller, i.e., the base station. Preserving the privacy of these assets from the attackers is imperative. An attacker may backtrack the message flow and eventually capture the asset. In this work, we aim to improve the source location privacy, which is measured by the safety period, by designing a new routing technique where randomized routes in the whole network are generated distributively between the node of origin and the base station. The diversity of the routing paths will lengthen the backtracking period of the attacker and thus increase the safety period. The key feature of the solution is that it achieves improved source location privacy without hampering the network lifetime. Unlike the existing solutions, the proposed technique does not employ any fake sources that decreases the network lifetime due to generation of large number of dummy packets. The solution performs quite well even when the asset is near the base station. The proposed method is analysed and compared with forward random walk and phantom single path routing schemes. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves improved privacy level with more uncertainty in the routing paths than the current techniques.
Efficient aggregation technique for data privacy in wireless sensor networks
Article, IET Networks, 2018, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the existing cluster-based private data aggregation techniques are energyintensive due to high message transmission complexity. Reliable data transmissions are also vital for resource constraint WSNs. To address these issues, the authors propose a reliability enabled private data aggregation technique that has message transmission complexity of O(N). Every node in the cluster cleaves its data into n integrants using simple modular arithmetic with suitable prime moduli and transmits to the cluster heads (CHs) for intermediate aggregation. The CHs, in turn, forward the partial aggregate data to the base station where the final aggregate is recovered using an elegant Chinese remainder theorem. The authors use data privacy, communication overhead, and reliability metrics to gauge the performance of the proposed work. Numerical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms the existing schemes having O(N2) communication complexity.
A novel source location privacy preservation technique to achieve enhanced privacy and network lifetime in WSNs
Article, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 2018, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this paper, we propose a two-phase routing technique using multiple virtual sources to provide enhanced source location privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We use the concept of escape-angle and random walks that is based on potential energy. The proposed method routes packets to the base station via different virtual sources located at various positions in the network. The key idea of this work is to exploit the excess energy available in the non-hotspot areas of the network to generate dispersive routes between source node and the virtual sources. This approach maximizes safety-period without hampering the network lifetime. We present mathematical models to estimate the overall energy expenditure that incurs at each node during Min Hop Routing phase (phase two). We then determine the remaining amount of energy which could be used for Stochastic and Diffusive Routing phase (phase one). Simulation results show that the proposed technique achieves improved safety-period without hampering the network lifetime.
Application of the Chinese remainder theorem for source location privacy in wireless sensor networks
Conference paper, 2016 IEEE Students' Technology Symposium, TechSym 2016, 2017, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
In this paper, we investigate an application of the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) for a novel privacy preserving routing technique in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The distinctive nature of the proposed technique is gathering the data, aggregating and then slicing the aggregate using t-out-of-n secret sharing scheme (based on CRT) and then route the packets to the sink via multiple paths. The sink will recover the final aggregate with just t shares using CRT. The multi-objective of the proposed technique is to provide data privacy, identity privacy, source location privacy, and route privacy. The solution also mitigates the problem of packet losses associated with the unreliable wireless communication medium by improving the reliability. We also propose an enhanced privacy preserving routing technique that achieves network wide routing paths, and overcomes the drawback of existing phantom single-path routing (PSPR) and forward random walk-based routing (FRW) schemes. Finally, we present the details of the proposed technique with a numerical example and give its possible application for secret and dynamic routing in WSNs. We also show the simulation results to validate the proposed method and comparison with PSPR and FRW techniques demonstrates that our scheme outperforms the other two solutions.
An energy-efficient routing technique for privacy preservation of assets monitored with WSN
Conference paper, IEEE TechSym 2014 - 2014 IEEE Students' Technology Symposium, 2014, DOI Link
View abstract ⏷
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are deployed to monitor the assets (endangered species) and report the locations of these assets to the Base Station (BS) also known as Sink. The hunter (adversary) attacks the network at one or two hops away from the Sink, eavesdrops the wireless communication links and traces back to the location of the asset to capture them. The existing solutions proposed to preserve the privacy of the assets lack in energy efficiency as they rely on random walk routing technique and fake packet injection technique so as to obfuscate the hunter from locating the assets. In this paper we present an energy efficient privacy preserved routing algorithm where the event (i.e., asset) detected nodes called as source nodes report the events' location information to the Base Station using phantom source (also known as phantom node) concept and a-angle anonymity concept. Routing is done using existing greedy routing protocol. Comparison through simulations shows that our solution reduces the energy consumption and delay while maintaining the same level of privacy as that of two existing popular techniques. © 2014 IEEE.
