Privacy preserved wireless sensor location protocols based on mobile edge computing

• Published in: Computers & security 2019-07, Vol.84, p.393-401
• Main Authors: Jiang, Han, Wang, Hao, Zheng, Zhihua, Xu, Qiuliang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer privacy; Cryptography; Edge computing; Encryption; Homomorphic encryption; Internet of Things; Mobile computing; Mobile-edge computing; Position sensing; Privacy; Privacy preserved multilateration; Privacy preserved trilateration; Protocol (computers); Sensors; Wireless sensor location
• ISSN: 0167-4048; 1872-6208
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2018.07.023

The emergence of all kinds of Internet of Things applications have brought great convenience to the people’s life, while wireless sensor location is one of the most important basements for them. Security and privacy issues should always the top priority of a system, however, the privacy protection of wireless sensor location is particularly difficult. In this paper, corresponding to the most common location algorithms, trilateration and multilateration, two privacy preserved location protocols are proposed based on Paillier’s homomorphic encryption scheme. The protocols are designed in Mobile-Edge Computing architecture. Different from other schemes who protect location privacy by identity anonymity, the proposed protocols protect the privacy of the real location information. The base stations who are semi-honest and not colluding with each other, send the encrypted distance data to edge server, and edge server computes on ciphertext and products the encrypted location of the sensor. The security of the protocols is based on the semantic security of Paillier encryption. To obtain the sensor’s position in a privacy protect manner, all the extra calculations include one step of encryption for each base station and one step of decryption for sensor, and only two times of message transmission are needed, the proposed protocols are secure and practical.