Sink location privacy protection under direction attack in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have been widely deployed in military and civilian applications. Due to the nature of the sensor network, it is easy for an adversary to trace the movement of packets and get the sink location. Many ways have been proposed to deal with this problem, most of them provide path diversity. But these techniques always expose direction information. Once adversaries have got the direction information, they can launch a direction attack by deducing the direction of the sink and choosing right paths to trace. To cope with the direction attack, we present an improved scheme based on injecting fake packets and random walk of real packets. In this scheme, real packets do a random walk to hide direction information at a special phase, fake packets are injected in intersection nodes of two or more shortest paths, which can lead adversaries to fake paths. Privacy analysis shows that our scheme has a good performance on protecting sink location. We also examine the delivery time, energy consumption and safe time by simulations.