Application of the Chinese remainder theorem for source location privacy in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we investigate an application of the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) for a novel privacy preserving routing technique in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The distinctive nature of the proposed technique is gathering the data, aggregating and then slicing the aggregate using t-out-of-n secret sharing scheme (based on CRT) and then route the packets to the sink via multiple paths. The sink will recover the final aggregate with just t shares using CRT. The multi-objective of the proposed technique is to provide data privacy, identity privacy, source location privacy, and route privacy. The solution also mitigates the problem of packet losses associated with the unreliable wireless communication medium by improving the reliability. We also propose an enhanced privacy preserving routing technique that achieves network wide routing paths, and overcomes the drawback of existing phantom single-path routing (PSPR) and forward random walk-based routing (FRW) schemes. Finally, we present the details of the proposed technique with a numerical example and give its possible application for secret and dynamic routing in WSNs. We also show the simulation results to validate the proposed method and comparison with PSPR and FRW techniques demonstrates that our scheme outperforms the other two solutions.