Energy-Aware Cross-Layer Technique for Countering Traffic Analysis Attacks on Wireless Sensor Network
Loading...
Links to Files
Author/Creator
Ebrahimi, Yousef
Younis, Mohamed
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2022-12-16
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
Y. Ebrahimi and M. Younis, "Energy-Aware Cross-Layer Technique for Countering Traffic Analysis Attacks on Wireless Sensor Network," in IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 131036-131052, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3230362.
Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Subjects
Abstract
The vital role of a base station (BS) in a wireless sensor network (WSN) has made it a
favorable target in hostile environments. Despite attempts to physically make the BS hidden to prying
eyes, traffic analysis would give an adversary insight into the network topology and the BS whereabouts.
Evidence Theory (ET) is a prominent methodology for performing such an analysis. Unfortunately, all
existing countermeasures not only overlook patterns of energy usage in WSNs, but also impose untamed
overhead that shortens the WSN lifetime. In this paper, we first propose a novel energy-aware and multi-zone
scheme to significantly reduce the overhead of countermeasures on highly overburdened nodes in the BS
proximity, and hence significantly improve the WSN lifespan. We also show how our proposed scheme
improves resilience against ET via diminishing the collected evidence by an adversary. We then propose a
novel cross-layer technique that exploits transmission range adjustment to confuse the adversary about the
data paths. This results in a versatile and effective countermeasure that significantly improves anonymity of
the BS. The performance is validated through extensive simulation experiments.