Per Packet Flow Anonymization in 6LoWPAN IoT Networks

• Published in: 2018 6th International Conference on Wireless Networks and Mobile Communications (WINCOM) pp. 1 - 7
• Main Authors: Kouachi, Asma Iman, Sahraoui, Somia, Bachir, Abdelmalik
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-10-2018
• Subjects: 6LoWPAN; addressing; internet of Things (IoT); privacy
• DOI: 10.1109/WINCOM.2018.8629719

We deal with privacy problems resulting from the possibility of communication-flow identification and tracking in the currently designed IPv6 Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN)-based solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT). We propose a solution that makes it difficult for an attacker to detect that a communication is taking place between a source and a destination entities by disguising the main flow identifying fields in 6LoWPAN packet headers. Our solution is based on the One Time Address (OTA) approach proposed for the traditional Internet, with a focus on low complexity, memory footprint, and energy consumption. We evaluated our solution that we called micro OTA (uOTA) by implementing it on the Cooja simulator and compared it with micro Moving Target IPv6 Defense (uMT6D). Results show that our solution improves communication flow privacy in IoT and outperforms uMT6D in energy consumption, network overhead, latency, and privacy preservation.