Systematic Survey on Privacy-Preserving Architectures for IoT and Vehicular Data Sharing: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions

TL;DR

This survey analyzes 75 privacy-preserving architectures for IoT and vehicular data sharing, revealing a dominance of decentralized computation approaches, highlighting the privacy-efficiency-trust trade-off, and proposing hybrid solutions as future directions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel three-dimensional taxonomy for classifying architectures and provides a comprehensive security and maturity assessment of existing solutions.

Findings

Decentralized computation approaches dominate recent research.

Most solutions excel in one or two dimensions but not all three.

Emerging hybrid architectures are identified as promising future directions.

Abstract

The proliferation of IoT and V2X systems generates unprecedented sensitive data at the network edge, demanding privacy-preserving architectures that enable secure sharing without exposing raw information. Contemporary solutions face a fundamental privacy-efficiency-trust trilemma: achieving strong privacy guarantees, computational efficiency for resource-constrained devices, and decentralized trust simultaneously remains intractable with single-paradigm approaches. This survey systematically analyzes 75 technical papers (2007--2025) through a novel three-dimensional taxonomy classifying architectures into Decentralized Computation, Cryptography-based, and Distributed Ledger approaches. Temporal analysis reveals dramatic acceleration during 2024--2025, with 48% of all papers published in this period -- Decentralized Computation dominates at 44% of contributions and 59% of 2025 publications. Comprehensive Security Threat Mapping and Technology Maturity Assessment demonstrate that mature solutions occupy narrow design regions excelling in one or two dimensions while compromising others, conclusively validating the trilemma hypothesis. We identify emerging hybrid architectures combining complementary paradigms as the essential path forward. Critical challenges including security guarantee composition across layers, multi-layer coordination overhead minimization, and post-quantum security integration must be addressed for practical deployment in next-generation intelligent transportation systems and IoT ecosystems.