A General Purpose Data and Query Privacy Preserving Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The large number of devices characterizing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide the benefits of observing, tracking, and recording everything; nonetheless, the cumulative computing power of those devices is typically not utilized, and the few implementations taking advantage of it neglect privacy or are application-specific. This manuscript describes a privacy-preserving protocol that enables WSN nodes to jointly compute an arbitrary function without disclosing their own private inputs. The computation takes place at data source nodes, while computation instructions and intermediate results move across the network secured by cryptography. The protocol relies on the Onion Routing technique to provide uniformly distributed network traffic and confine the knowledge a foreign actor can gain from monitoring messages traveling the network. We show that the communication protocol is privacy-preserving against the external and internal attacker models, and we validate our protocol implementation using the NS3 network simulator.