A Novel Deception-Based Scheme to Secure the Location Information for IoBT Entities

The Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is a subdomain of the Internet of Things (IoT) that applies to a battlefield. Due to the limited communication infrastructure, the entities in the battlefield communicate with each other using Device-2-Device (D2D) communication. D2D is used to send and request extremely sensitive data as well as the location information of other entities. Thus, to execute tasks and avoid information leaks, it is critical to protect the location data of soldiers and equipment. To the best of our knowledge, location privacy issues in IoBT have not been fully investigated. The attackers are expected to probe the network before attacking valuable assets, giving them an advantage over the defenders. This advantage can be offset by using deception-based methods. In this study, we propose a deception-based scheme to enhance the location information security of IoBT nodes. A novel encryption method is proposed along with dummy identities and dummy packets. We develop a mathematical model to evaluate the proposed scheme in terms of safety time, probability of failure, and probability of identifying the real packet. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in reducing the probability of identifying the real location of the communicating entities. We develop NetLogo simulation to validate the mathematical model.