Privacy-preserving channel access using blindfolded packet transmissions

This paper proposes a novel wireless MAC-layer approach towards achieving channel access anonymity. Nodes autonomously select periodic TDMA-like time-slots for channel access by employing a novel channel sensing strategy, and they do so without explicitly sharing any identity information with other nodes in the network. An add-on hardware module for the proposed channel sensing has been developed and the proposed protocol has been implemented in Tinyos-2.x. Extensive evaluation has been done on a test-bed consisting of Mica2 hardware, where we have studied the protocol's functionality and convergence characteristics. The functionality results collected at a sniffer node using RSSI traces validate the syntax and semantics of the protocol. Experimentally evaluated convergence characteristics from the Tinyos test-bed were also found to be satisfactory.

[1]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  Improving wireless privacy with an identifier-free link layer protocol , 2008, MobiSys '08.

[2]  Falko Dressler,et al.  Effects and Implications of Beacon Collisions in Co-Located IEEE 802.15.4 Networks , 2012, 2012 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Fall).

[3]  Paramvir Bahl,et al.  RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system , 2000, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064).

[4]  J. Elson,et al.  Fine-grained network time synchronization using reference broadcasts , 2002, OSDI '02.

[5]  Xuemin Shen,et al.  An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Wireless Link Layer Security , 2008, IEEE GLOBECOM 2008 - 2008 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference.

[6]  Koen Langendoen,et al.  An adaptive energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2003, SenSys '03.

[7]  Gerd Kortuem,et al.  Smart objects as building blocks for the Internet of things , 2010, IEEE Internet Computing.

[8]  Francesca Cuomo,et al.  Funneling-MAC: a localized, sink-oriented MAC for boosting fidelity in sensor networks , 2006, SenSys '06.

[9]  Jan M. Rabaey,et al.  A study of energy consumption and reliability in a multi-hop sensor network , 2004, MOCO.

[10]  Dijiang Huang,et al.  A comparative study on anonymous 802.11n protocols , 2008, MILCOM 2008 - 2008 IEEE Military Communications Conference.

[11]  Jenhui Chen,et al.  Improvement of Slots Utilization with a Stealing-TDMA Protocol for Ad Hoc Network , 2006, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference.

[12]  Matt Welsh,et al.  Simulating the power consumption of large-scale sensor network applications , 2004, SenSys '04.

[13]  Gu-Yeon Wei,et al.  A portable, low-power, wireless two-lead EKG system , 2004, The 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[14]  Panagiotis Papadimitratos,et al.  Efficient and robust pseudonymous authentication in VANET , 2007, VANET '07.

[15]  Vitaly Shmatikov,et al.  Timing Analysis in Low-Latency Mix Networks: Attacks and Defenses , 2006, ESORICS.

[16]  Jiming Chen,et al.  Network Coding Based Privacy Preservation against Traffic Analysis in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[17]  Lili Qiu,et al.  Statistical identification of encrypted Web browsing traffic , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[18]  Dijiang Huang.  Unlinkability Measure for IEEE 802.11 Based MANETs , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[19]  A. Pfitzmann,et al.  Anonymity, Unlinkability, Unobservability, Pseudonymity, and Identity Management – A Consolidated Proposal for Terminology , 2002 .

[20]  Xiang-Yang Li,et al.  Energy Efficient TDMA Sleep Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2009, IEEE INFOCOM 2009.

[21]  George Danezis,et al.  Mixminion: design of a type III anonymous remailer protocol , 2003, 2003 Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2003..

[22]  Bruce Hajek,et al.  Hiding traffic flow in communication networks , 1992, MILCOM 92 Conference Record.

[23]  David E. Culler,et al.  Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks , 2004, SenSys '04.

[24]  Dijiang Huang,et al.  STARS: A Statistical Traffic Pattern Discovery System for MANETs , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

[25]  Kamin Whitehouse,et al.  Protecting your daily in-home activity information from a wireless snooping attack , 2008, UbiComp.

[26]  Xuemin Shen,et al.  An Efficient Privacy-Preserving Scheme against Traffic Analysis Attacks in Network Coding , 2009, IEEE INFOCOM 2009.

[27]  Yuguang Fang,et al.  MASK: anonymous on-demand routing in mobile ad hoc networks , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

[28]  Ramesh Govindan,et al.  Cloud-enabled privacy-preserving collaborative learning for mobile sensing , 2012, SenSys '12.

[29]  Imrich Chlamtac,et al.  Internet of things: Vision, applications and research challenges , 2012, Ad Hoc Networks.

[30]  Ness B. Shroff,et al.  Energy Efficient Sleep/Wake Scheduling for Multi-Hop Sensor Networks: Non-Convexity and Approximation Algorithm , 2007, IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[31]  Asim Smailagic,et al.  Location sensing and privacy in a context-aware computing environment , 2002, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[32]  Shu Jiang.  An Anonymous MAC Protocol for Wireless Ad-hoc Networks , 2007 .

[33]  Subir Biswas,et al.  Distributed TDMA for privacy sensitive anonymous networks , 2012, 2012 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM).

[34]  Maria-Gabriella Di Benedetto,et al.  UWB body area network coexistence by interference mitigation , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband.

[35]  Lida Xu,et al.  The internet of things: a survey , 2014, Information Systems Frontiers.

[36]  Antonio Capone,et al.  RR-ALOHA, a Reliable R-ALOHA broadcast channel for ad-hoc inter-vehicle communication networks , 2002 .

[37]  Bernhard Plattner,et al.  Introducing MorphMix: peer-to-peer based anonymous Internet usage with collusion detection , 2002, WPES '02.

[38]  Fan Zhang,et al.  Defending Against Traffic Analysis in Wireless Networks through Traffic Reshaping , 2011, 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[39]  Paul F. Syverson,et al.  Anonymous connections and onion routing , 1998, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[40]  J. Degesys,et al.  DESYNC: Self-Organizing Desynchronization and TDMA on Wireless Sensor Networks , 2007, 2007 6th International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks.

[41]  Nitin H. Vaidya,et al.  A mix route algorithm for mix-net in wireless mobile ad hoc networks , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (IEEE Cat. No.04EX975).

[42]  Paul Syverson,et al.  Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections , 1999 .

[43]  Christoph P. Mayer.  Electronic Communications of the EASST Volume 17 ( 2009 ) Workshops der Wissenschaftlichen Konferenz Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen 2009 ( WowKiVS 2009 ) Security and Privacy Challenges in the Internet of Things , 2008 .

[44]  Renjie Huang,et al.  TreeMAC: Localized TDMA MAC protocol for real-time high-data-rate sensor networks , 2009, Pervasive Mob. Comput..

[45]  Denh Sy,et al.  ODAR: On-Demand Anonymous Routing in Ad Hoc Networks , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems.

[46]  Chun Chen,et al.  Distributed privacy-preserving access control in a single-owner multi-user sensor network , 2011, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[47]  Dijiang Huang.  Traffic analysis-based unlinkability measure for IEEE 802.11b-based communication systems , 2006, WiSe '06.

[48]  S. Yousefi,et al.  Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs): Challenges and Perspectives , 2006, 2006 6th International Conference on ITS Telecommunications.

[49]  Injong Rhee,et al.  Z-MAC: a hybrid MAC for wireless sensor networks , 2008, TNET.

[50]  Azzedine Boukerche,et al.  SDAR: a secure distributed anonymous routing protocol for wireless and mobile ad hoc networks , 2004, 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks.

[51]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  An energy-efficient MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks , 2002, Proceedings.Twenty-First Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.

[52]  ZeadallySherali,et al.  Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETS) , 2012 .

[53]  Robert H. Deng,et al.  A novel privacy preserving authentication and access control scheme for pervasive computing environments , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

[54]  Peter Friess,et al.  Internet of Things: Converging Technologies for Smart Environments and Integrated Ecosystems , 2013 .

[55]  B. Awerbuch,et al.  The pulse protocol: sensor network routing and power saving , 2004, IEEE MILCOM 2004. Military Communications Conference, 2004..

[56]  Shijue Zheng,et al.  A Scheduling Algorithm for TDMA-Based MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks , 2009, 2009 First International Workshop on Education Technology and Computer Science.

[57]  Laura Marie Feeney.  Exploring semantic interference in heterogeneous sensor networks , 2008, HeterSanet '08.

[58]  Kui Ren,et al.  Distributed Privacy-Preserving Access Control in Sensor Networks , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

[59]  Christofer Toumazou,et al.  Energy Efficient Medium Access Protocol for Wireless Medical Body Area Sensor Networks , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.

[60]  Zhihui Chen,et al.  Self organization and energy efficient TDMA MAC protocol by wake up for wireless sensor networks , 2004, 2004 First Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2004. IEEE SECON 2004..

[61]  S. Drude,et al.  Requirements and Application Scenarios for Body Area Networks , 2007, 2007 16th IST Mobile and Wireless Communications Summit.

[62]  Yunhao Liu,et al.  Priv-Code: Preserving privacy against traffic analysis through network coding for multihop wireless networks , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[63]  Tao Wu,et al.  Toward In-Band Self-Organization in Energy-Efficient MAC Protocols for Sensor Networks , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

[64]  Frederik Armknecht,et al.  Who Said That? Privacy at Link Layer , 2007, IEEE INFOCOM 2007 - 26th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[65]  Nitin H. Vaidya,et al.  A dynamic mix method for wireless ad hoc networks , 2001, 2001 MILCOM Proceedings Communications for Network-Centric Operations: Creating the Information Force (Cat. No.01CH37277).

[66]  Matthew K. Wright,et al.  Timing Attacks in Low-Latency Mix Systems (Extended Abstract) , 2004, Financial Cryptography.

[67]  Charles V. Wright,et al.  Traffic Morphing: An Efficient Defense Against Statistical Traffic Analysis , 2009, NDSS.

[68]  Yunnan Wu,et al.  Network Coding for the Internet and Wireless Networks , 2007, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

[69]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[70]  Bart Preneel,et al.  ARM: Anonymous Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks , 2006, 20th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications - Volume 1 (AINA'06).

[71]  Flaminio Borgonovo,et al.  ADHOC MAC: New MAC Architecture for Ad Hoc Networks Providing Efficient and Reliable Point-to-Point and Broadcast Services , 2004, Wirel. Networks.

[72]  Injong Rhee,et al.  DRAND: Distributed Randomized TDMA Scheduling for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.