Energy-Efficient Privacy Protection for Smart Home Environments Using Behavioral Semantics

Sensors

Homin Park¹  Can Basaran²  Taejoon Park¹ 

[1] Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), 333 Techno Jungang-Daero, Hyeonpung-Myeon, Dalseong-Gun, Daegu 711-873, Korea; E-Mails:;Northern Cyprus Campus, Middle East Technical University, Mersin 10, Turkey; E-Mail:

关键词: privacy;    wireless sensor networks;    activities of daily living;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s140916235

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Research on smart environments saturated with ubiquitous computing devices is rapidly advancing while raising serious privacy issues. According to recent studies, privacy concerns significantly hinder widespread adoption of smart home technologies. Previous work has shown that it is possible to infer the activities of daily living within environments equipped with wireless sensors by monitoring radio fingerprints and traffic patterns. Since data encryption cannot prevent privacy invasions exploiting transmission pattern analysis and statistical inference, various methods based on fake data generation for concealing traffic patterns have been studied. In this paper, we describe an energy-efficient, light-weight, low-latency algorithm for creating dummy activities that are semantically similar to the observed phenomena. By using these cloaking activities, the amount of fake data transmissions can be flexibly controlled to support a trade-off between energy efficiency and privacy protection. According to the experiments using real data collected from a smart home environment, our proposed method can extend the lifetime of the network by more than 2× compared to the previous methods in the literature. Furthermore, the activity cloaking method supports low latency transmission of real data while also significantly reducing the accuracy of the wireless snooping attacks.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.