Averting In-Situ Adversaries in Wireless Sensor Network Using Deceptive Traffic

Sensors in wireless sensor networks probe their surroundings and send their findings to a nearby base-station over multi-hop routes. In a hostile application environment the network may be attacked. Since the base-station plays a critical role and acts as a sink for all data traffic, it may be subject of pointed attack from an adversary that opts to inflict the most impact on the network. Despite of all physical precautionary measures for hiding the base-station, traffic analysis techniques can uncover its location since it is the end point of all data routes. This paper presents a novel distributed algorithm that boosts the anonymity of the base-station. A local sniffer adversary model is assumed where the source of a transmission is determined and used to search for the next hop until reaching the base-station. To counter such an attack, sensors in the vicinity of the adversary will transmit deceptive packets in order to divert the sniffer away from the base-station. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the approach.