ABSTRACT
Anonymity networks are communications systems that allow individuals to interact with each other without revealing their identity or other sensitive information about themselves, like their habits or preferences. These systems have been around, at least theoretically, for several decades now since David Chaum first proposed a scheme for the transmission of untraceable e-mails through the Internet. This work pioneered many others and nowadays research in anonymous communications is a very prolific and solid field of study with a number of leading conferences and with realworld solutions, like the Tor network, which are used by millions of people on a daily basis.∗
These systems are capable of providing some privacy guarantees by employing a number of techniques that are intended to obfuscate the traffic pattern. Since the location privacy problem is basically due to the pronounced communication pattern in sensor networks, it seems reasonable to study whether existing solutions are able to provide an adequate protection level in the sensors’ domain before devising new ones. Therefore, this chapter analyzes the suitability of computer-based anonymous communications systems for the protection of location privacy in WSNs.
