Fake source-based source location privacy in wireless sensor networks

摘要

The development of novel wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, such as asset monitoring, has led tornnovel reliability requirements. One such property is source location privacy (SLP). The original SLP problemrnis to protect the location of a source node in aWSN from a single distributed eavesdropper attacker. Severalrntechniques have been proposed to address the SLP problem, and most of them use some form of trafficrnanalysis and engineering to provide enhanced SLP. The use of fake sources is considered to be promisingrnfor providing SLP, and several works have investigated the effectiveness of the fake sources approach underrnvarious attacker models. However, very little work has been done to understand the theoretical underpinningsrnof the fake source technique. In this paper, we (i) provide a novel formalisation of the fake sources selectionrnproblem; (ii) prove the fake sources selection problem to be NP-complete; (iii) provide parametric heuristicsrnfor three different network configurations; and (iv) show that these heuristics provide (near) optimal levels ofrnSLP under appropriate parameterisation. Our results show that fake sources can provide a high level of SLP.rnOur work is the first to investigate the theoretical underpinnings of the fake source technique.