Enhancing Privacy in Wearable IoT through a Provenance Architecture

Richard Lomotey,Kenneth Sofranko,Rita Orji

doi:10.3390/mti2020018

Richard Lomotey, Kenneth Sofranko + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2020018

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Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is inspired by network interconnectedness of humans, objects, and cloud services to facilitate new use cases and new business models across multiple enterprise domains including healthcare. This creates the need for continuous data streaming in IoT architectures which are mainly designed following the broadcast model. The model facilitates IoT devices to sense and deliver information to other nodes (e.g., cloud, physical objects, etc.) that are interested in the information. However, this is a recipe for privacy breaches since sensitive data, such as personal vitals from wearables, can be delivered to undesired sniffing nodes. In order to protect users’ privacy and manufacturers’ IP, as well as detecting and blocking malicious activity, this research paper proposes privacy-oriented IoT architecture following the provenance technique. This ensures that the IoT data will only be delivered to the nodes that subscribe to receive the information. Using the provenance technique to ensure high transparency, the work is able to provide trace routes for digital audit trail. Several empirical evaluations are conducted in a real-world wearable IoT ecosystem to prove the superiority of the proposed work.

Highlights

There are several billions of smart, connected “things” around us today that enable the creation of new opportunities, use cases, and applications [1,2,3,4]
These devices are constantly running and ready to send data anytime a requesting node makes a demand. This means users mostly put the devices in broadcast mode so that they are discoverable for the data exchange process. Once these wearable devices are within discoverable range, any other node can make a request and if proper privacy measures are not in place, personalized data can be stolen by unauthorized persons
By focusing on wearable Internet of Things (IoT) and personal data exchanges, this paper proposes the broadcast-subscriber IoT model where users’ personal data are only shared with intended nodes such as healthcare facilities or devices authorized by the user

Summary

Introduction

There are several billions of smart, connected “things” around us today that enable the creation of new opportunities, use cases, and applications [1,2,3,4]. Taking wearable IoT for example, smartwatches and other sensors (e.g., blood oxygen reader, gamma ray radiation detectors, etc.) are facilitated to collect personal records including vitals, location, dosage, and so on These devices are constantly running and ready to send data anytime a requesting node makes a demand. With the Internet of Things (IoT), addressable machines (or objects) such as smart sensors and other physical devices that are ideally not seen as computers, can interact with less human intervention [1,6,7,8,9] This has given rise to new use cases in the management and sharing of personal data with caregivers where sensors and smartwatches can stream personal vitals; an area known as wearable IoT. Compromising data is cheaper because there are several protocols that can be explored on the same device for digital content accessibility

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