SCOUT: a sink camouflage and concealed data delivery paradigm for circumvention of sink-targeted cyber threats in wireless sensor networks

In modern epoch of cyber warfare and their countermeasures, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are highly susceptible to cyber attacks due to their primary reliance over sink. WSNs perform routing and communication to deliver data from sources to sink. In this many-to-one communication paradigm, while some failure might be affordable at the many sources side, the single sink cannot be allowed any downtime, let alone be a failure. In a WSN security attack scenario, an attacker makes efforts to bring a sink down by identifying and capturing it. The current state of the art in sink protection schemes prevents such failures by preserving its privacy through letting it operate in promiscuous and all-the-time listening mode. However, such operation is still vulnerable to privacy divulgence because the attacker detects its all-the-time listening operation and identifies it. Furthermore, listening is an energy-expensive operation in WSNs that makes the sink battery die very quickly. In this paper, we propose a new sink privacy preservation scheme that defines the role of cooperating nodes. These cooperating nodes create a camouflage around the sink such that the location of the sink is never revealed. Such operational dispositioning reduces the susceptibility of WSNs generally and sink, particularly against the sink-targeted cyber attacks. Since the sink adopts sleep schedule, our scheme is energy efficient as well.