An overview of privacy preserving techniques in smart home Wireless Sensor Networks

A smart home is a building in which ubiquitous computing and information technology are deployed to expect and respond to the occupants' needs and to enhance their everyday's life. To achieve this goal, smart homes rely on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for collecting all kind of personal data. Nevertheless, information privacy is one of the most sensitive issues for users nowadays. Therefore it becomes of utmost importance to ensure this privacy in smart homes. This is particularly challenging because of the specific characteristics of WSN (e.g. limited resources: energy, storage, computation, communication) and the specific smart home environment. This paper overviews existing techniques for content-based privacy and contextual-based privacy in smart home environments according to a set of proposed criteria.