A Pseudonym Assignment for the Last Mile Wireless Access to 4G Networks

The last mile wireless access to 4G networks is inherently vulnerable to various attacks due to broadcasting feature of transmission. Although most wireless communication systems provide the security measures, they focus on the protection of the contents of a message. Therefore, the header part of each message including the source and destination addresses is transmitted in a plain-text format, which can reveal the information that is useful to an attacker. In this paper, we solve the loss of anonymity of the last mile wireless access through a novel pseudonym assignment scheme. Specifically, a master node generates pseudonym sets for slave nodes by using Unique Pair Sequence (UPS) which we first devised, and assigns them to each node. Since every node randomly uses one of pseudonyms in the set as ID whenever it transmits a message, our scheme can prevent an attacker from attempting a traffic analysis attack.