Skip to main content

Preserving Query Privacy in Urban Sensing Systems

  • Conference paper

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 7129)

Abstract

Urban Sensing is an emerging paradigm that combines the ubiquity of smartphones with measurement capabilities of sensor networks. While this concept is still in development, related security and privacy concerns become increasingly more relevant. In this paper, we focus on a number of scenarios where nodes of an Urban Sensing system are subject to individual queries. We address the problem of protecting query privacy (i.e., hiding which node matches the query) and data privacy (i.e., hiding sensed data). We introduce a realistic network model and two novel adversarial models: resident and non-resident adversaries. For each of them, we propose a distributed privacy-preserving technique and evaluate its effectiveness via analysis and simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define and address both query and data privacy in the context of Urban Sensing. Our techniques are tunable, trading off the level of privacy assurance with a small overhead increase. We additionally provide a relevant improvement of data reliability and availability, while only relying on standard symmetric cryptography. The practicality of our proposals is demonstrated both analytically and experimentally.

Keywords

  • Data Privacy
  • Computational Overhead
  • Message Overhead
  • Private Information Retrieval
  • Dissemination Message

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (Canada)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Burke, J., Estrin, D., Hansen, M., Parker, A., Ramanathan, N., Reddy, S., Srivastava, M.: Participatory Sensing. In: World Sensor Web Workshop (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Chang, K., Shin, K.G.: Distributed authentication of program integrity verification in wireless sensor networks. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur. 11 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Chaum, D.L.: Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of ACM 24(2) (1981)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Chor, B., Kushilevitz, E., Goldreich, O., Sudan, M.: Private information retrieval. Journal of ACM 45(6) (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cormen, T., Leiserson, C., Rivest, R., Stein, C.: Introduction to Algorithms. MIT Press, Cambridge (2001)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  6. Cornelius, C., Kapadia, A., Kotz, D., Peebles, D., Shin, M., Triandopoulos, N.: AnonySense: Privacy-aware people-centric sensing. In: MobiSys (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Das, T., Mohan, P., Padmanabhan, V., Ramjee, R., Sharma, A.: PRISM: Platform for Remote Sensing using Smartphones. In: MobiSys (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  8. De Cristofaro, E., Ding, X., Tsudik, G.: Privacy-preserving querying in wireless sensor networks. In: ICCCN (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  9. De Cristofaro, E., Soriente, C.: PEPSI: Privacy-Enhanced Participatory Sensing Infrastructure. In: WiSec (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ganti, R., Pham, N., Tsai, Y., Abdelzaher, T.: PoolView: Stream Privacy for Grassroots Participatory Sensing. In: SenSys (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Huang, K., Kanhere, S., Hu, W.: Preserving Privacy in Participatory Sensing Systems. Computer Communications 33(11) (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Lee, J., Hoh, B.: Sell Your Experiences: A Market Mechanism based Incentive for Participatory Sensing. In: PerCom (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lu, H., Pan, W., Lane, N., Choudhury, T., Campbell, A.: SoundSense: Scalable Sound Sensing for People-Centric Applications on Mobile Phones. In: MobiSys (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Machanavajjhala, A., Kifer, D., Gehrke, J., Venkitasubramaniam, M.: l-diversity: Privacy beyond k-anonymity. ACM Trans. on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD) 1(1) (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Mathur, S., Jin, T., Kasturirangan, N., Chandrasekaran, J., Xue, W., Gruteser, M., Trappe, W.: ParkNet: Drive-by Sensing of Road-side Parking Statistics. In: MobiSys (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Menezes, A.: Elliptic curve public key cryptosystems. Kluwer (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Mohan, P., Padmanabhan, V., Ramjee, R.: Rich Monitoring of Road and Traffic Conditions using Mobile Smartphones. In: SenSys (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Ortolani, S., Conti, M., Crispo, B., Di Pietro, R.: Event Handoff Unobservability in WSN. In: Camenisch, J., Kisimov, V., Dubovitskaya, M. (eds.) iNetSec 2010. LNCS, vol. 6555, pp. 20–28. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  19. Ortolani, S., Conti, M., Crispo, B., Di Pietro, R.: Events privacy in WSNs: A new model and its application. In: WoWMoM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Paulos, E., Honicky, R., Goodman, E.: Sensing Atmosphere. In: SenSys Workshops (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Perito, D., Tsudik, G.: Secure Code Update for Embedded Devices Via Proofs of Secure Erasure. In: Gritzalis, D., Preneel, B., Theoharidou, M. (eds.) ESORICS 2010. LNCS, vol. 6345, pp. 643–662. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  22. Reddy, S., Estrin, D., Srivastava, M.: Recruitment Framework for Participatory Sensing Data collections. In: Floréen, P., Krüger, A., Spasojevic, M. (eds.) Pervasive Computing. LNCS, vol. 6030, pp. 138–155. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    CrossRef  Google Scholar 

  23. Reed, M.G., Syverson, P.F., Goldschlag, D.M.: Anonymous connections and onion routing. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 16(4) (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Shi, J., Zhang, R., Liu, Y., Zhang, Y.: PriSense: Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation in People-Centric Urban Sensing Systems. In: INFOCOM (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Sion, R., Carbunar, B.: On the Computational Practicality of Private Information Retrieval. In: NDSS (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Sweeney, L.: k-Anonymity: A model for Protecting Privacy. Int. J. Uncertain. Fuzziness Knowl.-Based Syst. 10(5) (2002)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

Copyright information

© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

De Cristofaro, E., Di Pietro, R. (2012). Preserving Query Privacy in Urban Sensing Systems. In: Bononi, L., Datta, A.K., Devismes, S., Misra, A. (eds) Distributed Computing and Networking. ICDCN 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7129. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25959-3_17

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25959-3_17

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25958-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25959-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)