Preserving Receiver-Location Privacy in WSNs

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Presented at ISPEC 2014 by

The unattended nature of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) together with the hardware limitation of sensor nodes make them susceptible to various types of attacks. Since the base station is the destination of all communications, the most rewarding attack is to compromise or destroy this critical device. This talk discusses the importance of receiver-location privacy for the survivability of the network, illustrating the particular features that originate the problem and the strategies followed by a typical adversary. A solution will be presented that is capable of thwarting the most common attacks with a computationally lightweight mechanism. However, the success of this solution is dependent on whether the adversary is capable of capturing and analysing the contents of a subset of sensor nodes. Then, we will explore some intuitive solutions that fail to provide sufficient protection against such adversaries and finally introduce an evolutionary algorithm that provides some means of protection at the expense of increased overhead. The talk will conclude by presenting some open issues.