iHIDE: hiding sources of information in WSNs

Abstract

In the most deployment scenarios of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) the sensors are statically distributed and configured to propagate the captured information towards the sink-sensor. This information might be unclassified, such as environmental data, or private, such as the location of an important asset. In the latter case, security mechanisms might be essential to ensure the confidentiality of the location of the information source. Such mechanisms might exploit light cryptographic systems, such us elliptic curve, to authenticate and cipher the information that is relayed towards the sink. On the other hand, the static configuration of WSNs might simplify the apocalypses of the information source. An eavesdropper might use reverse packet-routing engineering to expose the location of the sensor that captured and reported the phenomenon. To deal with this issue, we have introduced a novel approach, called iHIDE - information hiding in distributing environments, to enable source-location privacy in WSNs. iHIDE adopts a non-geographical, overlay routing method for packet delivery. This paper introduces the architecture, and assesses its performance through simulation experiments, providing comparisons with relative approaches