A General Purpose Data and Query Privacy Preserving Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
This addresses privacy and security issues for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques like Onion Routing.
The paper tackles the problem of data and query privacy in wireless sensor networks by proposing a protocol that uses Onion Routing and in-situ processing to protect aggregated data, with simulation results showing scalability and constraints.
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are composed of a large number of spatially distributed devices equipped with sensing technology and interlinked via radio signaling. A WSN deployed for monitoring purposes can provide a ubiquitous view over the monitored environment. However, the management of collected data is very resource-consuming and raises security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving protocol for collecting aggregated data from WSNs. The protocol relies on the Onion Routing technique to provide uniformly distributed network traffic and confine the knowledge a foreign actor can gain from monitoring messages traveling the network. Our solution employs the computing power of nodes in the network by conveying them general-purpose computer code for in-situ processing and aggregation of data sourcing from multiple sensor nodes. We complement our work with a simulation of the proposed solution using the network simulator ns-3. Results of the simulation give an overview of the scalability of the solution and highlight potential constraints.