Source-Location Privacy Protection Based on Anonymity Cloud in Wireless Sensor Networks

An adversary can deploy parasitic sensor nodes into wireless sensor networks to collect radio traffic distributions and trace back messages to their source nodes. Then, he can locate the monitored targets around the source nodes with a high probability. In this paper, a Source-location privacy Protection scheme based on Anonymity Cloud (SPAC) is proposed. We first design a light-weight (t, n)-threshold message sharing scheme and map the original message to a set of message shares which are shorter in length and can be processed and delivered with minimal energy consumption. Based on the shares, the source node constructs an anonymity cloud with an irregular shape around itself to protect its location privacy. Specifically, an anonymity cloud is a set of active nodes with similar radio actions and they are statistically indistinguishable from each other. The size of the cloud is controlled by the preset number of hops that the shares can walk in the cloud. At the border of the cloud, the fake source nodes independently send the shares to the sink node through proper routing algorithms. At last, the original message can be recovered by the sink node once at least t shares are received. The simulation results demonstrate that the SPAC can strongly protect the source-location privacy in an efficient manner. Moreover, the message sharing mechanism of SPAC increases the confidentiality of network data and it also brings high tolerance for the failures of sensor nodes to the data transmission process.