Obfuscated Counting in Single-Hop Radio Network

In this paper we consider the problem of listing all active stations in a single hop radio network in such a way that the outer adversary observing communication could not gain any significant information about the real number of stations. We also consider a counterpart of this problem such that only a good approximation of the number of activated stations is needed. This problem is motivated mainly by military applications of sensors networks, however we present how our approach can be extended to other natural problems and similar models. In our paper we present two algorithms for secure listing and size approximation of the set of activated stations. Both of them are fairly practical (in terms of volume of communication, time of execution and computational complexity) and provably secure for the assumed adversarial model.