Enabling Location Privacy in Wireless Personal Area Networks

2009

We discuss location privacy issues in wireless sensor networks. We consider sensor nodes with more responsible roles and the need to protect locations of such nodes. Available countermeasures against various types of traffic analysis attacks are examined and their problems are identified. We do not propose new traffic analysis resistance technique. Instead, we draw attention to blanks in current situation and identify several open questions, which should be answered in order to ensure location privacy of nodes.

IET Communications, 2011

Extensive work has been done on the protection of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) from the hardware to the application layer. However, only recently, the privacy preservation problem has drawn the attention of the research community because of its challenging nature. This problem is exacerbated in the domain of WSNs due to the extreme resource limitation of sensor nodes. In this paper we focus on the location privacy problem in WSNs, which allows an adversary to determine the location of nodes of interest to him. We provide a taxonomy of solutions based on the power of the adversary and the main techniques proposed by the various solutions. In addition, we describe and analyse the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. Finally, we discuss some open challenges and future directions of research.

2007

Due to the open nature of a sensor network, it is relatively easy for an adversary to eavesdrop and trace packet movement in the network in order to capture the receiver physically. After studying the adversary's behavior patterns, we present countermeasures to this problem. We propose a locationprivacy routing protocol (LPR) that is easy to implement and provides path diversity. Combining with fake packet injection, LPR is able to minimize the traffic direction information that an adversary can retrieve from eavesdropping. By making the directions of both incoming and outgoing traffic at a sensor node uniformly distributed, the new defense system makes it very hard for an adversary to perform analysis on locally gathered information and infer the direction to which the receiver locates. We evaluate our defense system based on three criteria: delivery time, privacy protection strength, and energy cost. The simulation results show that LPR with fake packet injection is capable of providing strong protection for the receiver's location privacy. Under similar energy cost, the safe time of the receiver provided by LPR is much longer than other methods, including Phantom routing [1] and DEFP [2]. The performance of our system can be tuned through a couple of parameters that determine the tradeoff between energy cost and the strength of location-privacy protection.

2003

Abstract After more than two decades of hype, computing and communication technologies are finally converging. Java-enabled cell phones run a host of powerful applications including mobile Internet access, while many notebook computers offer high-speed wireless connectivity as a standard feature. The big decision when purchasing a PDA is whether to get integrated cellular service or Wi-Fi capability.

2015

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is built of many sensor nodes. The sensors can sense a phenomenon, which will be represented in a form of data and sent to an aggregator for further processing. WSN is used in many applications, such as object tracking and security monitoring. The objects in many situations need physical and location protection. In addition to the source location privacy, sink location privacy should be provided. Providing an efficient location privacy solution would be challenging due to the open nature of the WSN. Anonymity is a key solution for location privacy. We present a network model that is protected against local, multilocal, and global adversaries that can launch sophisticated passive and active attacks against the WSN.

Journal of Computer Systems, Networks, and Communications, 2010

In hybrid wireless sensor networks, where trusted and un-trusted nodes coexist, it becomes important to allow trusted nodes to share information, especially, location information and prevent un-trusted nodes from gaining access to this information. We focus on anchor-based localization algorithms in WSNs, where a small set of specialized nodes, that is, anchor nodes, broadcast their location to the network and other nodes can use the broadcast information to estimate their own location. The main challenge is that both trusted and un-trusted nodes can measure the physical signal transmitted from anchor nodes and use it to estimate their locations. In this paper, we propose Hidden Anchor, an algorithm that provides anchor physical layer location privacy for different classes of localization algorithms. The Hidden Anchor algorithm exploits the inherently noisy wireless channel and uses identity cloning of neighboring trusted nodes to make anchors unobservable to un-trusted nodes while providing complete information to trusted nodes. Evaluation of the Hidden Anchor algorithm through analysis and simulation shows that it can hide the identity, and hence the location, of anchor nodes with very low overhead. In addition, the results show that by adding artificial noise, we can achieve significant improvement in anchor's location privacy.

Wireless Sensor Networks is considered to be one of the cornerstones of Ambient Intelligence since they can be used in countless applications, where sensors are unobtrusively embedded into the environment to perform operations like monitoring, tracking and reporting. In such scenarios, privacy issues must be carefully considered since the mere observation of the network operation might reveal great amounts of private information to unauthorised parties. One of the problems that is gaining more attention in the realm of privacy, is the location privacy problem, which aims to prevent attackers from obtaining the location of specific nodes of interest to him. In this paper we provide a general overview of the proposed solutions to counter this threat. Finally, we will also discuss some open challenges and future directions of research for a convenient management of privacy issues in smart environments.

Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Location privacy is of utmost concern for location-based services. It is the property that a person's location is revealed to other entities, such as a service provider or the person's friends, only if this release is strictly necessary and authorized by the person. We study how to achieve location privacy for a service that alerts people of nearby friends. Here, location privacy guarantees that users of the service can learn a friend's location if and only if the friend is actually nearby. We introduce three protocols-Louis, Lester and Pierre-that provide location privacy for such a service. The key advantage of our protocols is that they are distributed and do not require a separate service provider that is aware of people's locations. The evaluation of our sample implementation demonstrates that the protocols are sufficiently fast to be practical.

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2005

Location and presence information will provide considerable value to information and communication services. Nevertheless, the users are still concerned about revealing their position data especially to un-trusted third party applications. Furthermore, legal restrictions are effective in most countries that regulate processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in electronic communications. In this paper we propose a novel privacy enhancement solution (PRIVES) which is targeted for location and presence services in the 3G service architecture and uses cryptographic techniques well suited to run in small devices with little computing and power resources. Once a user is granted the permission to localize another user, the location server generates a key used to create pseudonyms that are specific for the localized user. Passed from the watcher to the location server via the application, these pseudonyms identify both the watcher and the desired localized user at the location server, but are opaque to the application. The paper presents architecture and protocols of the proposed solution and discusses the performance increase in comparison with current implementations.