Maelstrom: Receiver-Location Preserving in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sinks or base stations are the key nodes of the networks which receive and process data from sensor nodes, hence their location should be protected well. However, they can easy fall prey to attacks launched by adversaries. In this paper, we propose a novel countermeasure Maelstrom to protect the location privacy of the key nodes in WSNs from both traffic analysis and packet tracing attacks. The basic idea of Maelstrom is to pre-assign several maelstrom areas in a network, which serve as the destinations of fake packets generated by sensor nodes. We also propose an Approximate Shortest Routing protocol (ASR) for packet delivery. Combining ASR with maelstroms congregated by fake packets, an adversary who launches both traffic analysis and packet tracing attack will be thwarted. The simulation results show that, compared with LPR combined with fake packet injection, under similar energy cost, Maelstrom can remarkably enhance the security of receiver-location in WSNs.

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