There is a critical need to provide privacy assurances for distributed vision-based sensor networking in applications such as building surveillance and healthcare monitoring. To effectively address protection and reliability issues, secure networking and processing must be considered from system inception. This paper presents attacks that affect the data privacy in visual sensor networks and proposes privacy-promoting security solutions based on opponent detection via game-theoretic analysis and keyless encryption.

There is a critical need to provide privacy and security assurances for distributed multimedia sensor networking in applications including military surveillance and healthcare monitoring. Such guarantees enable the widespread adoption of such information systems, leading to large-scale societal benefit. To effectively address protection and reliability issues, secure communications and processing must be considered from system inception. Due to the emerging nature of broadband sensor systems, this provides fertile research ground for proposing more paradigm-shifting approaches. This paper discusses issues in designing for security and privacy in distributed multimedia sensor networks. We introduce the heterogeneous lightweight sensornets for trusted visual computing framework for distributed multimedia sensor networks. Protection issues within this architecture are analyzed, leading to the development of open research problems including secure routing in emerging free-space optical sensor networks and distributed privacy for vision-rich sensor networking. Proposed solutions to these problems are presented, demonstrating the necessary interaction among signal processing, networking, and cryptography.

This correspondence studies the distributed secret sharing problem which is a twist of the classical secret sharing problem. In this new problem, each user needs to encode his or her own unique secret message without collaboration with other users and without the use of any common secret materials or cryptographic keys. The goal is to ensure that an adversary without access to all of the encoded messages learns as little as possible about the secret messages, while a legitimate joint decoder with all the encoded messages can decode all of them without cryptographic keys. Furthermore the users do not know the channels that will be compromised ahead of time, and thus must protect all channels. Specifically, we study two related variants of this problem. The first problem deals with source coding and secrecy, while the second problem deals with channel coding and secrecy. From the results of these two problems, we conclude that interference is necessary for unconditional secrecy.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) deployed in hostile environments are susceptible to various attacks directed at their data. In this work we focus on an emerging and largely unexplored issue arising from the presence of actuator (or actor) nodes in the form of Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks (WSANs). Specifically, we consider the case where hostile WSAN nodes belonging to a foreign network directly perturb the readings of WSN nodes during sensing. The attack is modeled as affecting the decision that a WSN node reports about the presence or absence of a phenomenon to its cluster head. To assess the potential loss of sensing fidelity due to the opposing network, we employ a game theoretic analysis. We focus on determining the probability that the WSN cluster head becomes alerted to such an attack given some statistical information about the phenomenon. Our results show that an actuation attack may go unnoticed even if such an attack is not coordinated among the hostile WSAN nodes. Importantly, the number of WSN nodes in a cluster affects the probability of WSAN attack success. For clusters consisting of only a few nodes, the hostile WSAN may achieve a stealthy attack with a wider range of attack parameters. We also determine that natural phenomena with certain characteristics are more susceptible to the attack and require further sensing-verification mechanisms.

In traditional secret sharing, a central trusted authority must divide a secret into multiple parts, called shares, such that the secret can only be recovered when a certain number of shares are available for reconstruction [1], [2]. In this paper, we consider a secret sharing problem in which each share must be created separately by independent entities such that no collaboration or shared cryptographic keys are required; we call this the distributed keyless secret sharing problem. For this problem, general tradeoffs between compression and secrecy are characterized yielding the impossibility result that perfect secrecy is unachievable. In response to this impossibility, we define a practical measure of secrecy and design a low-cost solution based on this measure of secrecy.

This paper studies distributed joint secrecy and compression suitable for sensor networks. A capacity region that characterizes the tradeoff between compression and secrecy is derived. We demonstrate for the two-node case that under the restriction of separate enciphering (i.e., no inter-node collaboration) unconditional secrecy by both parties cannot be achieved simultaneously. A fundamental design rule for lightweight encoder implementation critical for secrecy based on distributed source coding using syndromes and Reed-Solomon codes is presented highlighting practical feasibility.