Attacker Location Evaluation-Based Fake Source Scheduling for Source Location Privacy in Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR: An attacker location evaluation-based fake source scheduling (FSSE) for source location privacy in CPS has a more stable privacy level and more efficient transmission delay and energy consumption than the three compared algorithms, i.e., phantom routing, tree-based diversionary routing, and dynamic fake source selection.

Abstract: Cyber-physical systems (CPS) have been deployed in many areas and have reached unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency. However, the security and privacy problems in CPS have not been properly addressed, e.g., the monitored source location can be inferred by an attacker, which can substantially undermine the reliability of CPS. Unfortunately, the existing techniques to protect against the leakage of the source location do not achieve an acceptable balance among the source location privacy, transmission delay, and energy consumption to guarantee high reliability. To address this issue, we propose an attacker location evaluation-based fake source scheduling (FSSE) for source location privacy in CPS to enhance the privacy level and maintain the system performance. The proposed FSSE contains two main phases. The first, backbone construction, is dependent on the probability of capture derived from the communication information of self and neighboring nodes. This phase aims to build a backbone to form a baseline with respect to the source location privacy and transmission delay. The second phase is fake message scheduling, which is established to provide a trade-off among privacy, transmission delay, and communication overhead in terms of the hypothesized location of the attacker by using stochastic processes. Through analysis and simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed method has a more stable privacy level and more efficient transmission delay and energy consumption than the three compared algorithms, i.e., phantom routing, tree-based diversionary routing, and dynamic fake source selection.