An energy-efficient source-anonymity protocol in surveillance systems

Abstract Source-location privacy is a critical security property in event-surveillance systems. However, due to the characteristics of surveillance systems, e.g., resource constraints, diverse privacy requirements and large-scale network, the existing anonymity mechanisms cannot effectively deal with the problem of source-location privacy protection. There is an imbalance on network load and transmission latency for most of the existing anonymity schemes, which causes “funnel effect” and conflicts with anonymity. This paper proposes the dynamic optimal mix-ring-based source-location anonymity protocol, DORing. In this scheme, we first set the dynamic optimal mix-ring to collect and mix the network traffic, which can satisfy the diverse QoS requirements for all the packets. Secondly, we propose the sector-based anonymity assess to control the process of mixing in order to filter out the dummy packets and deliver the authentic packets to sink. Finally, the location of mix-ring is adjusted to balance network energy consumption, prolong the lifetime of the network and resist global attack. The simulation results demonstrate that DORing is very efficient in balancing energy consumption and transmission latency and can significantly prolong survival period of the network and ensure security as well as latency to satisfy the packets’ requirements.