Achieving Better Privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Trusted Computing

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is an ad-hoc wireless network composed of small sensor nodes deployed in large numbers. Sensor nodes are usually severely resource limited and power constrained. They are often deployed in accessible areas and interact closely with their physical surroundings and people. Security enforcement in WSNs is thus a challenging task. In this paper we propose a clustered heterogeneous architecture for WSNs, where high-end cluster heads are incorporated, and the cluster heads are further equipped with trusted computing technology (TC). As such, the cluster heads act as trusted parties, and are expected to help effectively address privacy issues in WSNs. As concrete examples, we discuss in details how user query privacy and source location privacy can be better protected in such TC-enabled WSNs.