Base-station Location Anonymity and Security Technique (BLAST) for Wireless Sensor Networks

To ensure the uninterrupted usage in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), it is important to preserve the location privacy of sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel technique of protecting the location privacy of the base station in a WSN. Many techniques have been proposed to protect the source in WSNs and relatively fewer techniques exist to protect the base station. Our technique, which we call BLAST is aimed at protecting the base station from both Packet Tracing and Traffic Analysis attacks with equal importance to the delay and energy consumption. It also provides reasonable privacy against a Global attacker. The core idea is to vary the transmission range of a set of selected sensors around the base to confuse the attacker. Through this technique, we are able to create a set of fake base stations which cannot be identified even by a strong Global attacker who can hear all the transmissions.