Privacy-Preserving Querying in Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide sensing and monitoring services by means of many tiny autonomous devices equipped with wireless radio transceivers. With large-scale WSNs being deployed on a long-term basis, not only security but also privacy issues must be taken into account. Furthermore, when network operators offer on-demand access to sensor measurements to their clients, query mechanisms should ideally leak neither client interests nor query patterns. In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving WSN query mechanism that uses standard cryptographic techniques. Besides preventing unauthorized entities from accessing sensor readings, it minimizes leakage of (potentially sensitive) information about users´ query targets and patterns.