The Effect of Hop-count Modification Attack on Random Walk-based SLP Schemes Developed forWSNs: a Study

TL;DR

This paper investigates how hybrid active-passive attacks compromise source location privacy in wireless sensor networks, revealing significant vulnerabilities in existing TTL-based random walk schemes and emphasizing the need for more robust privacy solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid attack model and demonstrates its effectiveness against three existing TTL-based SLP schemes, highlighting their vulnerabilities.

Findings

Hybrid attacks significantly degrade privacy performance.

Existing TTL-based schemes are vulnerable to hybrid attacks.

Hybrid attack optimization increases scheme vulnerability.

Abstract

Source location privacy (SLP) has been of great concern in WSNs when deployed for habitat monitoring applications. The issue is taken care of by employing privacy-preserving routing schemes. In the existing works, the attacker is assumed to be passive in nature and backtracks to the source of information by eavesdropping the message signals. In this work, we try to understand the impact of active attacks by proposing a new hybrid attack model consisting of both active and passive attacks. The proposed model is then applied to three existing TTL-based random walk SLP solutions: phantom routing scheme (PRS), source location privacy using randomized routes (SLP-R), and position-independent section-based scheme (PSSLP). The performance of the algorithms in terms of privacy metrics is compared in the case of pure passive attack and hybrid attack of varying intensity. The results indicate a significant degradation in the privacy protection performance of the reference algorithms in the face of the proposed hybrid attack model indicating the importance and relevance of such attacks. It is further observed that the hybrid attack can be optimized to increase the vulnerability of the existing solutions.