Events privacy in WSNs: A new model and its application

  • Authors:
  • S. Ortolani;M. Conti;B. Crispo;R. Di Pietro

  • Affiliations:
  • Vrije Univ., Amsterdam, Netherlands;Vrije Univ., Amsterdam, Netherlands;Univ. of Trento, Trento, Italy;Univ. di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy

  • Venue:
  • WOWMOM '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

A novel issue resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are affected by is context privacy. Indeed, while a few solutions do exist to provide data privacy to WSNs (i.e. to protect message confidentiality), providing context privacy (e.g. preventing an adversary to locate the source of a message) is still an open research problem. This paper attacks the issue providing several contributions. First, a formal model to reason about event privacy in WSNs is introduced. This model also captures dynamic events. Second, we introduce a new realistic class of mobile events a WSN can experience. These events become the target of our privacy preserving efforts. Third, we propose a privacy enforcing solution for the above class of events: the Unobservable Handoff Trajectory (UHT) Protocol. UHT is scalable and distributed. The analysis shows that it is both effective and efficient in terms of the induced overhead. It also minimizes the delay to notify the event sources location to the base station, while preserving the intended degree of privacy. Finally, extensive simulations confirm our findings.