Maintaining Source Privacy Under Eavesdropping and Node Compromise Attacks

In a sensor network, an important problem is to provide privacy to the event detecting sensor node and integrity to the data gathered by the node. Compromised source privacy can inadvertently leak event location. Existing techniques use either random walk path or generate fake event packets to make it hard for the adversary to trace-back to the source, since encryption alone may not help prevent a traffic analysis attack. In this paper, without using the traditional overhead intensive methods, the authors present a scheme to hide source information using cryptographic techniques incurring lower overhead.