Abstract

Even though many security schemes proposed for wireless sensor networks protect transmitted data content from being revealed to different types of attacks and fulfill most of the desired security requirements, they are not addressing concealing the privacy of the contextual information. Contextual information such as event occurrence, event time, and event location can be exposed to an adversary by just monitoring network packet transmission. This kind of information is very important because it can leak location information of key nodes or even detected events themselves. Therefore, proposing a contextual unobservability scheme is a challenging task in sensor networks considering many issues: the broadcast nature of the wireless channel, the different attacker models, the network resource constraints, and the overhead on system performance. Most of the existing location privacy schemes are not addressing all these issues and are either not efficient against global adversaries or degrade significantly network performance. Thus in this paper, we propose an efficient location contextual anonymity scheme for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN) that exploits the cross-layer joint design among the application, routing, and MAC layers. Our proposed location unobservability scheme combines the source coding technique, probabilistic packet transmission, multipath routing, and priority-based dropping policy to enhance the efficiency level of the provided privacy service without noticeably affecting the Quality of Service (QoS) requirement for delivering multimedia content in WMSN. Performance evaluation results show that our proposed privacy mechanism outperforms other proposed location privacy techniques in terms of privacy efficiency (safety period) and network performance (end-to-end delay and energy consumption).

Highlights

  • Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) [1,2] usually comprises a huge number of inexpensive, small size, and resource-constrained sensor nodes that are self-organized and wirelessly communicate to interact with the surrounding environment and measure several scalar physical parameters

  • Our proposed contextual privacy mechanism relies on a joint cross-layer architecture among the different layers of the communication stack to utilize the cross functionalities among the layers in order to build more effective sink/source location unobservability functionality against global attackers while providing Quality of Service (QoS) assurance in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN)

  • We introduce in this paper the first effective scheme that supports Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) with unobservability service regarding source/sink nodes locations and event occurrences

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Summary

Introduction

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) [1,2] usually comprises a huge number of inexpensive, small size, and resource-constrained sensor nodes that are self-organized and wirelessly communicate to interact with the surrounding environment and measure several scalar physical parameters. The mechanism puts an excessive overhead on the network, which leads to inappropriate delay in messages delivery, and wastes a lot of energy due to extra message transmissions Another way of privacy technique was introduced in [15,16] targeting global attacks, which attempts to maintain a constant traffic rate across all nodes in the network by sending fake packets. The proposed privacy scheme should not noticeably affect the system performance and the intended usage of the network, especially the case of WMSN where delivering multimedia content requires crucial constraints regarding the delivery delay and energy dissipation It should address the different capabilities of possible adversaries (local or global).

Theoretical Background and Related Work
System Model
Network model
Attacker model
Energy model
Priority-Based Cross-layer Contextual Unobservability Scheme
Multimedia processing technique in the application layer
Exponential distribution transmission with multipath routing
Packet priority and dropping policy
Performance Evaluation
Methodology
Packets delivery percentage
Image reconstruction delay
Safety period performance
Energy consumption performance
End-to-end delay performance
Conclusion
Findings
Authors

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