Preventing Attacks from Eavesdropper Using HMAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: A wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of numerous small sensing devices with limited communication range. The sensors collect data from the environment and report them to the sinks. With the promising sensing and wireless technologies, sensor networks are expected to be widely deployed in a broad spectrum of civil and military applications. Location information of the sinks, the sensors, and the objects being tracked are very important in sensor networks. Protecting location privacy in sensor networks is crucial considering different kinds of attacks that may disrupt the normal function of the networks. To identify location privacy issues in sensor networks and computes lower bound on the communication overhead to resolve those issues in order to achieve higher level of privacy. The two techniques to provide location privacy to monitored objects (source-location privacy)— periodic collection and source simulation—and two techniques to provide location privacy to data sinks (sink-location privacy)— sink simulation and backbone flooding. These techniques provide trade-offs between privacy, communication cost, and latency. Through analysis and simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed techniques are efficient and effective for source and sink- location privacy in sensor networks.

Keywords: Sensor networks, Network security, location privacy, source simulation, sink simulation.