Time-Based Privacy Protection for Multi-attribute Data in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks become ubiquitous to collect people´s information in many people-centric applications, such as, health care, smart space and public safety. Because any misusage of these personal data might result in the leakage of privacy, it is expected that the data requesters can only access to the data what they are entitled to read. Based on a revised hash chain technique, we proposed a novel time-based privacy protection (TPP) scheme for multi-attribute data in WSNs. In the scheme, all the personal data are divided into 2-D subspaces representing data attribute and generation time. Data in each subspace is encrypted with a sub-key before its transmission to the sink. Anyone who wants to read data attribute at a particular time must get the corresponding sub-key from the sender node. TPP can generate a sub-key for data in each subspace in an efficient manner in terms of less sub-key generation time and low memory space usage. The simulation results show that the schemes can be applied to the resource limited WSNs efficiently.