APCAPT: Asymmetric power control against packet tracer attacks for base station location anonymity

Base Station location anonymity is a critical aspect while securing a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) against local adversarial attacks. WSNs have a wide range of applications where security is a primary concern. Among different security issues, the area of base station (BS) location privacy has been relatively less explored. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to protect the location privacy of the BS against external packet tracer attacks by employing asymmetric power control for the transmissions along the multi hop path between the source and the sink. The transmission range at each sensor node is varied with the objective of minimizing the amount of distance the packet tracer can travel towards the sink, thereby preventing the attacker from tracing packets directly to the BS. We formulate this as an optimization problem and derive the optimal transmission levels for the routing paths to the BS based on our utility that minimizes the mobility of the local adversary. We evaluate the level of security provided by our scheme and measure the overhead involved in terms of additional energy consumed in the network.