Counterfeit Clones: A Novel Technique for Source and Sink Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an essential part of the Internet of Things (IoT). In WSNs, sensors are randomly deployed in harsh environments for monitoring purposes. In such environments, employing only the content protection mechanisms available leaves WSNs vulnerable to unauthorized interception by global and local adversaries. An attacker may exploit contextual data to locate the source or the sink; therefore, context privacy is an exigent part of WSN privacy that cannot be neglected. WSN is used in many applications and can transmit sensitive information. To protect sensitive information, it is necessary to provide protection techniques to prevent the adversary from breaching and exposing the location of the source and sink. Past works focus on protecting the location at the routing level; however, the adversary could bypass that and easily locate the nodes by capturing frames and discovering the source and destination addresses. In this paper, we propose the Counterfeit Clones (CC) scheme to protect nodes’ location privacy at the data link layer by using a lightweight one-way hash function to hide the MAC address. At the routing level, fake sources and sinks are deployed to obfuscate the source and the destination node identity. The performance analysis results confirm that the CC technique has a longer safety time with lower energy consumption in comparison with some of the existing solutions. Compared to contrasting algorithms, CC can increase the safety time and protect the location privacy for source and sink with faster packet transmission to the base station.