A cross-layer traffic analysis countermeasure against adaptive attackers of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In most Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications the sensors forward their readings to a central sink or base station (BS). The unique role of the BS makes it a natural target for an adversary's attack. Even if a WSN employs conventional security mechanisms such as encryption and authentication, an adversary may apply traffic analysis techniques to locate the BS. This motivates a significant need for improved BS anonymity to protect the identity, role, and location of the BS. Previous work presented distributed beamforming as an effective anonymity-boosting technique. Such work evaluated the anonymity performance of distributed beamforming when its application is unknown to the adversary. In this paper we reinforce the use of distributed beamforming as a cross-layer anonymity-boosting technique, even when the adversary is fully aware of its application and adapts the attack strategy accordingly. Moreover, we demonstrate that a cross-layer implementation of distributed beamforming successfully misdirects such an adaptive adversary.