Heuristic Approaches for Enhancing the Privacy of the Leader in IoT Networks

• Main Authors: Jie Ji, Guohua Wu, Jinguo Shuai, Zhen Zhang, Zhen Wang, Yizhi Ren
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-09-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: Internet of Things; network analysis; closeness centrality; greedy algorithm; optimization
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/18/3886

The privacy and security of the Internet of Things (IoT) are emerging as popular issues in the IoT. At present, there exist several pieces of research on network analysis on the IoT network, and malicious network analysis may threaten the privacy and security of the leader in the IoT networks. With this in mind, we focus on how to avoid malicious network analysis by modifying the topology of the IoT network and we choose closeness centrality as the network analysis tool. This paper makes three key contributions toward this problem: (1) An optimization problem of removing <i>k</i> edges to minimize (maximize) the closeness value (rank) of the leader; (2) A greedy (greedy and simulated annealing) algorithm to solve the closeness value (rank) case of the proposed optimization problem in polynomial time; and (3)UpdateCloseness (FastTopRank)&#8212;algorithm for computing closeness value (rank) efficiently. Experimental results prove the efficiency of our pruning algorithms and show that our heuristic algorithms can obtain accurate solutions compared with the optimal solution (the approximation ratio in the worst case is 0.85) and outperform the solutions obtained by other baseline algorithms (e.g., choose <i>k</i> edges with the highest degree sum).