A General Purpose Data and Query Privacy Preserving Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a privacy-preserving protocol for wireless sensor networks that uses Onion Routing and in-network data aggregation to enhance security and scalability, validated through ns-3 simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel protocol combining Onion Routing with in-network processing for secure data collection in WSNs, addressing privacy and resource constraints.

Findings

Protocol effectively anonymizes data traffic.

Simulation shows good scalability and potential constraints.

Enhances security without significant resource overhead.

Abstract

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.