A novel traffic analysis attack model and base‐station anonymity metrics for wireless sensor networks
Nikolaos Baroutis, Mohamed Younis · Security and Communication Networks · 2016
Abstract In applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), all data packets are directed toward the base‐station (BS) over multi‐hop routes. In addition to data processing, the BS can interface the WSN to remote centers. Therefore, the failure of the BS diminishes the network utility and makes the data inaccessible. An adversary would thus try to uncover the BS's location by analyzing the traffic patterns of the network in order to launch denial of service attacks. For that reason, various countermeasure techniques have been proposed to boost the anonymity of the BS. In this paper, we study the existing traffic analysis models that an adversary could apply to locate the BS and point out shortcomings that make contemporary countermeasures weaker than thought. We further present a novel attack model that increases the adversary's confidence in localizing the BS while significantly reducing the traffic analysis complexity. Additionally, we introduce two novel anonymity metrics that can be used for evaluating the network resilience to attacks and for gauging the performance of countermeasures. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed attack model. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.