AAiBA: Attracting an Adversary for Increasing Base-Station Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the most interesting research areas in recent years. A WSN is mainly composed of a set of homogeneous sensor nodes and an in-situ base-station (BS) that are randomly deployed within a delimited area of interest. These sensor nodes sense the area and transmit the sensed data to the BS through multiple wireless communication hops. In addition to data collection, the BS performs highly complex management functions and controls the entire network. The importance of the BS in a WSN makes the BS a high-value target for an adversary that wants to disable the network. To launch a denial-of-service attack on the BS, an adversary intercepts the data transmissions sent to the BS and uses evidence theory as a technique of traffic analysis to find the BS. This paper proposes a technique to counter the attack and increase the BS's anonymity by creating cells and choosing HoneyCells from the created cells; the HoneyCells mimic the BS cell and attract the adversary's attention. Simulation results show that the proposed technique provides better BS anonymity.