Privacy preservation in wireless sensor networks: A state-of-the-art survey

Much of the existing work on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has focused on addressing the power and computational resource constraints of WSNs by the design of specific routing, MAC, and cross-layer protocols. Recently, there have been heightened privacy concerns over the data collected by and transmitted through WSNs. The wireless transmission required by a WSN, and the self-organizing nature of its architecture, makes privacy protection for WSNs an especially challenging problem. This paper provides a state-of-the-art survey of privacy-preserving techniques for WSNs. In particular, we review two main categories of privacy-preserving techniques for protecting two types of private information, data-oriented and context-oriented privacy, respectively. We also discuss a number of important open challenges for future research. Our hope is that this paper sheds some light on a fruitful direction of future research for privacy preservation in WSNs. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.