Differential Privacy for IoT-Enabled Critical Infrastructure: A Comprehensive Survey

The rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm during the last decade has lead to its adoption in critical infrastructure. However, the multitude of benefits that are derived from the IoT paradigm are short-lived due to the exponential rise in the associated security and privacy threats. Adversaries carry out privacy-oriented attacks to gain access to the sensitive and confidential data of critical infrastructure for various self-centered, political and commercial gains. In the past, researchers have employed several privacy preservation approaches including cryptographic encryption and k-anonymity to secure IoT-enabled critical infrastructure. However, for various reasons, those proposed solutions are not well suited for modern IoT-enabled critical infrastructure. Therefore, Dwork’s differential privacy has emerged as the most viable privacy preservation strategy for IoT-enabled critical infrastructure. This paper provides a comprehensive and extensive survey of the application and implementation of differential privacy in four major application domains of IoT-enabled critical infrastructure: Smart Grids (SGs), Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs), healthcare and medical systems, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Finally, we discuss some promising future research directions in differential privacy for IoT-enabled critical infrastructure.