Title: Exploiting architectural techniques for boosting base-station anonymity in wireless sensor networks

Authors: Zhong Ren; Mohamed Younis

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) often serve mission-critical applications in hostile environments and may be thus a subject to attacks. Since the sensor data are collected at in situ base-station (BS), an adversary can inflict the maximal damage to a WSN by pinpointing the BS. In this paper, we propose three novel approaches for boosting the anonymity of the BS nodes to protect them from potential threats. We first explore the deployment of multiple BS nodes and provide guidelines on a cost versus anonymity trade-off to determine the most suitable BS count for a network. Second, we exploit the mobility of BS nodes and categorise the effect of relocating some of the existing BS nodes to the lowest anonymity regions. Finally, we pursue dynamic sensor to cluster re-association in order to change the traffic pattern and confuse the adversary. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated through simulation.

Keywords: WSNs; wireless sensor networks; base station anonymity; traffic analysis; location privacy; security; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2012.047150

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2012 Vol.11 No.4, pp.215 - 227

Published online: 01 Jun 2012 *

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