Anonymity and Hostile Node Identification in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In many secure wireless network attack scenarios, the source of a data packet is as sensitive as the data it contains. Existing work to provide source anonymity in wireless sensor networks (WSN) are not frugal in terms of transmission overhead. We present a set of schemes to provide secure source anonymity. As the state of the art in WSN advances, researchers increasingly look to heterogeneous network topologies. We leverage high powered cluster head nodes to further reduce transmission overhead and provide excellent scalability. A significant threat to WSN is the insider attack due to the ease of tampering with low-cost sensors. Should a node become compromised and start making malicious collisions, it is desirable to identify the corrupt node and revoke its keys. We present schemes to identify the source of an arbitrary transmission in a reliable and distributed fashion.