On the Trade-Off Between User-Location Privacy and Queried-Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Harms, Janelle
  • Vogt, Ryan
  • Nascimento, Mario

• Technical report TR09-07. By eavesdropping on a user's query in a sensor network, an adversary can deduce both the user's location and his/her area of interest. In many domains it is desirable to guarantee privacy of both places. Relying on the principle of k-anonymity, we propose an effective way to measure how well a disperse set of k queries protects the user's area of interest. However, issuing k queries instead of one facilitates the adversary determining the user's location. To address that issue, we define a quantitative measure of how much information the k queries leak about the user's location. Experiments reveal that how dispersed the k queries are has no effect on the privacy of the user's location. However, smaller k, randomized routing, and non-broadcast transmission improve the user's location privacy. We also show that compromising nodes in the user's network yields no significant advantage to the adversary over an eavesdropping strategy. | TRID-ID TR09-07

• Date created

  2009

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Database Systems
  • Wireless sensor networks
  • Privacy

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R37H1DT7P

• License

  Attribution 3.0 International