Quantitative Measurement and Design of Source-Location Privacy Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many areas for critical infrastructure monitoring and information collection. While confidentiality of the message can be ensured through content encryption, it is much more difficult to adequately address source-location privacy (SLP). For WSNs, SLP service is further complicated by the nature that the sensor nodes generally consist of low-cost and low-power radio devices. Computationally intensive cryptographic algorithms (such as public-key cryptosystems), and large scale broadcasting-based protocols may not be suitable. In this paper, we first propose criteria to quantitatively measure source-location information leakage in routing-based SLP protection schemes for WSNs. Through this model, we identify vulnerabilities of some well-known SLP protection schemes. We then propose a scheme to provide SLP through routing to a randomly selected intermediate node (RSIN) and a network mixing ring (NMR). Our security analysis, based on the proposed criteria, shows that the proposed scheme can provide excellent SLP. The comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is very efficient and can achieve a high message delivery ratio. We believe it can be used in many practical applications.