Context Protecting Privacy Preservation in Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing attempts to provide services in an invisible way with least user intervention. In ubiquitous computing domain context awareness is an important issue. So, mere protection of message confidentiality is not sufficient for most of the applications where context-awareness can lead to near deterministic ideas. An adversary might deduce sensitive information by observing the contextual data, which when correlated with prior information about the people and the physical locations that are being monitored by a set of sensors can reveal most of the sensitive information. So, it is obvious that for security and privacy preservation in ubiquitous computing context protection is of equal importance. In this paper, we propose a scheme which provides two layer privacy protection of user’s or application’s context data. Our proposed context protecting privacy preservation scheme focuses on protecting spatial and temporal contextual information. We consider the communication part of ubiquitous computing consists of tiny sensor nodes forming Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Through simulation we show the efficacy of our scheme. We also demonstrate the capability of our scheme to overcome the constraints of WSNs.