Node Location Privacy Protection in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Node location protection is critical to the wireless sensor networks (WSN), especially for unattended environment. However, due to most of the static deployment and the limitations in energy, storage, and communication capabilities of the sensors, WSNs are vulnerable to various location (and derivative) attacks. In this work, we study the node location privacy protection issue from both aspects of attacks and defenses. First, we present a new two-phase location attack for two important types of nodes (including base station and source node). It can locate a base station node within few amounts of local wireless transmission monitoring and then reversely trace the location of the source node. Different from existing methods, the proposed attack determines the node location based on the transmission direction, which can break through existing defenses. Then, to defend against such attacks, we design a pseudospiral-based routing protocol for WSN. We analyze the performance of parameters such as routing probability, maximum detectable angle, hop count, and number of loops based on PU SBRF, MoRF, and PLAUDIT methods. The theory analysis and confrontation experiment of attack and defense show that the proposed scheme can protect the location privacy of the target node with moderate communication and computation overhead.