A context-aware privacy-preserving method for IoT-based smart city using Software Defined Networking

Smart City is an application of the Internet of Things (IoT) with the aim of managing cities without human intervention. Each IoT device that is producing data may sense a sensitive one that should not be disclosed unintentionally. Due to the existence of a large number of devices in the near future, the possibility of information leakage, privacy breach, is increasing. To prevent this, each device applies a privacy-preserving method. We discover that all of the existing solutions have three major drawbacks: (1) applying one static privacy-preserving method for the entire system, (2) sending whole data at once, and (3) not context-aware. These cause unacceptable privacy-preserving degree. To address them, in this paper, at first, we equip IoT-based smart city with Software Defined Networking paradigm (SDN). Then, we mount an efficient privacy-preserving method on top of it that manages flowing data packets of split IoT device' data. We have done extensive simulation through MININET-WIFI to show the effectiveness of our approach. Evaluation results show that our method can be widely applied to the smart city application with a superior performance regarding accuracy, overhead, and penetration rate compared to existing privacy-preserving solutions. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.