Enhancing Source-Location Privacy in Sensor Network Routing

One of the most notable challenges threatening the successful deployment of sensor systems is privacy. Although many privacy-related issues can be addressed by security mechanisms, one sensor network privacy issue that cannot be adequately addressed by network security is source-location privacy. Adversaries may use RF localization techniques to perform hop-by-hop traceback to the source sensor’s location. This paper provides a formal model for the source-location privacy problem in sensor networks and examines the privacy characteristics of different sensor routing protocols. We examine two popular classes of routing protocols: the class of flooding protocols, and the class of routing protocols involving only a single path from the source to the sink. While investigating the privacy performance of routing protocols, we considered the tradeoffs between location-privacy and energy consumption. We found that most of the current protocols cannot provide efficient source-location privacy while maintaining desirable system performance. In order to provide efficient and private sensor communications, we devised new techniques to enhance source-location privacy that augment these routing protocols. One of our strategies, a technique we have called phantom routing, has proven flexible and capable of protecting the source’s location, while not incurring a noticeable increase in energy overhead. Further, we examined the effect of source mobility on location privacy. We showed that, even with the natural privacy amplification resulting from source mobility, our phantom routing techniques yield improved source-location privacy relative to other routing methods.