Preserving Privacy in Wireless Networks

Abstract

The rapid wireless technology development and wide wireless networks deployment provide to us emerging composite networks permeated by wireless communications. The current Internet will remain and serve as the ``communication bus' in the emerging composite wireless networks. How to preserve privacy of the ubiquitously available data in such networks poses a big challenge. This thesis serves as a starting point to the problem.

Data privacy can be content-wise or contextual, depending on how information is obtained from attacker observations. While many content-wise privacy protection mechanisms exist, they are either designed for simpler networks and information flows, or they suffer the scalability problem when network size continues to grow. Contextual privacy is relatively new research and relates to the extra information that can be inferred from observations of communication patterns. This thesis explores how to enhance current Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes with hierarchical key generation to preserve content-wise privacy. To preserve contextual privacy, the direction and volume of communication need to be hidden from attackers to the desired level. This thesis proposes routing control (Penalty-based Shortest Path Routing) and optimization-based routing protocol design to achieve these.