Sensor node source privacy and packet recovery under eavesdropping and node compromise attacks

Abstract

Securing a sensor network poses a variety of problems. Of those, an important one is of providing privacy to the event-detecting sensor node and integrity to the data gathered by the node. Compromised source privacy can inadvertently leak event location. Safeguarding the privacy of the source node is important, as sensor networks hold critical roles in military application, tracking endangered species, etc. Existing techniques in sensor networks use either random walk path or generate fake event packets to make it hard for an adversary to trace back to the source, since encryption alone may not help prevent a traffic analysis attack. In this work, without using traditional overhead-intensive methods, we present a scheme for hiding source information using cryptographic techniques incurring lower overhead. The packet is modified en route by dynamically selected nodes to make it difficult for a malicious entity to trace back the packet to a source node and also to prevent packet spoofing. This is important because the adversary model considers a super-local eavesdropper having the ability to compromise sensor nodes. Additionally, we provide a method for the base station to recover corrupted packets and identify the location of the compromised node. We analyze the ability of our proposed scheme to withstand different attacks and demonstrate its efficiency in terms of overhead and functionality when compared to existing work.