The effect of hop-count modification attack on random walk-based SLP schemes developed for WSNs: a study

The effect of hop-count modification attack on random walk-based SLP schemes developed for WSNs: a study

연구 분야: Infrastructure

학회: International Journal of Information Security

Source location privacy (SLP) has been of great concern in WSNs when deployed for habitat monitoring applications and is addressed by employing privacy-preserving routing schemes. However, in the existing works, the attacker is assumed to be passive in nature and backtracks to the source node by eavesdropping on the transmitted messages. The effectiveness of such SLP solutions when faced with an active attack is not yet known and is the purview of the current study. In this regard, we initially introduce a novel hybrid attacker model and then assess the impact of such a model on the location privacy performance of three existing time-to-live (TTL)-based random walk solutions—phantom routing scheme (PRS), source location privacy using randomized routes (SLP-R), and position-independent section-based scheme (PSSLP). The location privacy performance in terms of privacy metrics such as capture ratio, safety period, and entropy. It is observed that PSSLP is affected most by the proposed hybrid model with a 125% increase in capture ratio, 83.58%, and 17.36% respective reduction in safety period and entropy. The results indicate the importance and relevance of such attacks.