Abstract

A unique identifier is necessary for identifying an object, such as a physical equipment used in networks, a user, and a server, in information systems. Such an identifier can be used not only for identification but also for authentication and authorization purposes after binding additional information. However, regarding the wide use of those unique identifiers across multiple systems, a great concern about privacy is seriously growing because of strong possibilities in collecting personal behaviors and transactions histories. Various researches are in progress to solve this problem. However, most of them are related to an identity which is used in software applications. Since it does not guarantee the anonymity of network addresses which are actually the identity in the lower level of communications, the network traffic toward specific devices can be easily analyzed. This problem can be more critical in the networks which should minimize the leakage of traffic information, such as in military wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a new method that hides a receiver’s address in the data link layer. Moreover, to prevent attackers from identifying specific traffics, we make it hard to determine receivers of the traffics. The proposed method is suitable to wireless sensor networks due to the use of the bloom filter based on an efficient hash function primitive rather than more complex cryptographic primitives involving heavier computational overhead.