Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been attracting increased attention from the research and engineering communities, motivated by applications like security surveillance, border protection, combat field reconnaissance, environment and habitat monitoring, and target tracking. In these applications, a WSN typically consists of a large population of spatially distributed sensor nodes that cooperatively monitor conditions in their surroundings and report their findings to an in situ base station (BS). The BS not only collects and analyzes the incoming data, but also interfaces WSN to a higher authority. Hence, the unique role of the BS attracts adversary’s attention since it can be a single point of failure for WSN. In addition, in some applications such as target tracking, the node that detects and reports on an event could be of utmost importance for an intruder. An adversary that seeks to diminish the network utility can apply traffic analysis techniques to locate the sink of all packets (i.e., the BS) and/or the data sources in order to apply a denial of service attack, e.g., radio jamming. Countering such a threat necessitates enhanced BS and data source anonymity to conceal their identity, role, and location from external observers. This chapter analyzes the threat, highlights anonymity metrics, categorizes contemporary traffic analysis countermeasures, and discusses some of the emerging techniques.