k-Anonymous Query Scheme on the Internet of Things: a Zero Trust Architecture

Pin-Han Ho

¹ College of Technological Innovation, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE

² Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada

³ Department of Industry Engineering, Ajou University, Korea

*Corresponding author

The paper investigates query-anonymity in Internet of things (IoT) formed by a sensor cloud, where the sensor nodes provide services of sensing and are subject to user queries of sensing data. Due to the heterogeneity and multi-carrier natures of the sensor cloud, user privacy could be impaired when the queries have to go through nodes of a third party. Thus, the paper firstly introduces a novel query k-anonymity scheme that countermeasures such a privacy threat. Based on the proposed k-anonymity scheme, the trade-offs between the achieved query-anonymity and various performance measures including, communication-cost, return-on-investment metric, path-length, and location anonymity metrics, are analyzed. By adopting a hybrid approach that takes into account the average and worst-case analysis, our evaluation results show that most of the obtained bounds on various performance anonymity trade-offs can be expressed precisely in terms of the offered level-of-anonymity k and network diameter d.

Anonymity Performance Trade-offs, Cloud, Internet of Things, k-Anonymity, Privacy Preserving Protocols, Zero Trust Architecture

Kadhim Hayawi, Pin-Han Ho, Sujith Samuel Mathew, and Limei Peng (2021). k-Anonymous Query Scheme on the Internet of Things: a Zero Trust Architecture. Journal of Networking and Network Applications, Volume 1, Issue 3, pp. 88–102. https://doi.org/10.33969/J-NaNA.2021.010302.

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