A major limitation to the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in asset monitoring applications is security and privacy, particularly the privacy of source location information. In this article, we develop two phantom routing-based solutions to provide source location privacy for the case of multisource/asset scenario—the case that has received very little attention in the literature. The idea of phantom routing is to relay the packets to a distant node in a random fashion to obfuscate the traffic flows and confuse the attacker. The first technique phantom routing-based backward random walk (PRBRW) uses a combination of backward random walk (RW) and a greedy forwarding approach to route the packets to the base station (BS). Although the first approach has better performance improvements in terms of capture ratio and safety period it hampers the lifetime of the network and has a poor entropy metric. To better this problem, an improved phantom routing scheme phantom routing-based L-path RW (PRLPRW) is proposed. The second technique has three phases: 1) pure RW; 2) L-walk; and 3) greedy walk. This technique performs well in terms of capture ratio, safety period, and entropy metrics. The improvement in network lifetime is 10-folds and entropy is 477-folds when compared with PRBRW. The performance is evaluated using the developed analytical models and compared with the baseline protection-less scheme shortest path routing (SPR). It is observed that PRBRW and PRLPRW, respectively, have 60- and 73-fold improvements in terms of capture ratio when compared with SPR, whereas existing phantom routing-based pure RW and forward RW techniques, respectively, have only 54- and 34-fold improvements.

Privacy of critical locations (or events) is essential when monitored by Wireless Sensor Networks. To mitigate such issues, in this paper a new privacy protection technique named Position-independent and Section-based Source Location Privacy (PSSLP) is developed. A biased random walk and greedy walk using a three- or four-phase routing strategy is employed here, where the number of phases depends on the network segment in which the source is situated. The biased random walk is intended to send packets away from the source of information and make routing paths appear dynamic to the eavesdropper, whereas, the greedy routing ensures that the packets converge at the base station. The objective of the solution is to achieve a uniform amount of privacy irrespective of the position of the asset in the network without compromising the network lifetime. Performance evaluation is done using developed analytical models and simulation results reveal that PSSLP achieves 8247.06- and 33.0- folds improvement in terms safety period and NLT respectively compared to no source location privacy (SLP) protection technique (i.e., shortest path routing (SPR) technique).

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the existing cluster‐based private data aggregation techniques are energy‐intensive due to high message transmission complexity. Reliable data transmissions are also vital for resource constraint WSNs. To address these issues, the authors propose a reliability enabled private data aggregation technique that has message transmission complexity of . Every node in the cluster cleaves its data into n integrants using simple modular arithmetic with suitable prime moduli and transmits to the cluster heads (CHs) for intermediate aggregation. The CHs, in turn, forward the partial aggregate data to the base station where the final aggregate is recovered using an elegant Chinese remainder theorem. The authors use data privacy, communication overhead, and reliability metrics to gauge the performance of the proposed work. Numerical and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms the existing schemes having communication complexity.