Assessment of Privacy in Distributed Detection Problems

As a promising technology, wireless sensor networks have a wide range of applications. However, the development of wireless sensor networks is stillin face of multiple challenges. Among these challenges, the privacy issue is acritical parameter involved in providing secure and reliable services and...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Zuxing, Li
Format: Others
Language:English
Published: KTH, Kommunikationsteori 2013
Online Access:http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-121319
Description
Summary:As a promising technology, wireless sensor networks have a wide range of applications. However, the development of wireless sensor networks is stillin face of multiple challenges. Among these challenges, the privacy issue is acritical parameter involved in providing secure and reliable services and attracts much attention from researchers and engineers. In the last decade, alarge number of privacy solutions for wireless sensor networks have been proposed. However, most of them are taken as additional secure functionality blocks rather than being integrated in the original sensor network designs. In this thesis project, we will focus on the privacy assessment of a parallel distributed detection network, which represents a simplied physical-layer of wireless sensor networks. The security threat is assumed to come from a passive eavesdropper. Four privacy leakage criteria are proposed to evaluate the privacy issue of the distributed detection network in dierent scenarios. As references, the privacy leakages are evaluated by dierent criteria when the distributed detection system is optimized in the perspectives of Bayesian detection theory and information theory without considering the presence of the eavesdropper. Then, we propose the corresponding privacy-concerned distributed detection systems. Comparisons to the optimal detection systems are performed and they reveal the trade-off between privacy leakage suppression and detection performance degradation.