Accountable and Privacy-Enhanced Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

In general, owners and users of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are different entities. A user may want to hide his/her data access privacy from anyone else including the network owner and, at the same time, users who misbehave need to be identified. Such requirements necessitate privacy-preserving and accountable access control. In this paper, we develop a novel protocol, named APAC, to satisfy this need. First, APAC can enforce strict access control so that the sensed data is only accessible by the authorized users. Second, APAC offers sophisticated user privacy protection. Third, misbehaving users or owners can be audited and pinpointed. Last but not least, it does not rely on the existence of a trusted third party, and thus is more feasible in practice. The feasibility of the APAC is demonstrated by experiments on resource-limited mobile devices and sensor platforms.