Location privacy and resilience in wireless sensor networks querying

Due to the wireless nature of communication in sensor networks, the communication patterns between sensors could be leaked regardless of the adoption of encryption mechanisms - those would just protect the message content. However, communication patterns could provide valuable information to an adversary. For instance, this is the case when sensors reply to a query broadcast by a Base Station (BS); an adversary eavesdropping the communication traffic could realize which sensors are the ones that possibly match the query (that is, the ones that replied). This issue is complicated by the severe resource constrained environment WSNs are subject to, that call for efficient and scalable solutions. In this paper, we have addressed the problem of preserving the location privacy of the sensors of a wireless sensor network when they send a reply to a query broadcast by the BS. In particular, we deal with one of the worst scenarios for privacy: When sensors are queried by a BS to provide the MAX of their stored readings. We provide a probabilistic and scalable protocol to compute the MAX that enjoys the following features: (i) it guarantees the location privacy of the sensors replying to the query; (ii) it is resilient to an active adversary willing to alter the readings sent by the sensors; and, (iii) it allows to trade-off the accuracy of the result with (a small) overhead increase. Finally, extensive simulations support our analysis, showing the quality of our proposal.