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A passive method for privacy protection in the perceptual layer of IoTs

Xiaoyu Li (Graduate School of Information, Production and Systems, Waseda University, Fukuoka, Japan, and South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)
Osamu Yoshie (Graduate School of Information, Production and Systems, Waseda University, Fukuoka, Japan)
Daoping Huang (South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China)

International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications

ISSN: 1742-7371

Article publication date: 5 June 2017

160

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to detect the existence of unknown wireless devices which could result negative means to the privacy. The perceptual layer of internet of things (IoTs) suffers the most significant privacy disclosing because of limited hardware resources, huge quantity and wide varieties of sensing equipment. Determining whether there are unknown wireless devices in the communicating environment is an effective method to implement the privacy protection for the perceptual layer of IoTs.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use horizontal hierarchy slicing (HHS) algorithm to extract the morphology feature of signals. Meanwhile, partitioning around medoids algorithm is used to cluster the HHS curves and agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm is utilized to distinguish final results. Link quality indicator (LQI) data are chosen as the network parameters in this research.

Findings

Nowadays data encryption and anonymization are the most common methods to protect private information for the perceptual layer of IoTs. However, these efforts are ineffective to avoid privacy disclosure if the communication environment exists unknown wireless nodes which could be malicious devices. How to detect these unknown wireless devices in the communication environment is a valuable topic in the further research.

Originality/value

The authors derive an innovative and passive unknown wireless devices detection method based on the mathematical morphology and machine learning algorithms to detect the existence of unknown wireless devices which could result negative means to the privacy. The simulation results show their effectiveness in privacy protection.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 15K00495. This paper is the further work based on our paper in MoMM2016 series.

Citation

Li, X., Yoshie, O. and Huang, D. (2017), "A passive method for privacy protection in the perceptual layer of IoTs", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 194-210. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPCC-03-2017-0025

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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