Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions a world covered with billions of smart, interacting things capable of offering all sorts of services to near and remote entities. The benefits and comfort that the IoT will bring about are undeniable, however, these may come at the cost of an unprecedented loss of privacy. In this paper we look at the privacy problems of one of the key enablers of the IoT, namely wireless sensor networks, and analyse how these problems may evolve with the development of this complex paradigm. We also identify further challenges which are not directly associated with already existing privacy risks but will certainly have a major impact in our lives if not taken into serious consideration.

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been recognised as one of the major technological revolutions of this century [1, 2]. Although the IoT is still in its infancy and will only unleash its full potential with the development of a completely distributed approach [3], the importance of this paradigm has already been recognised by the major international standard bodies [4], which have come into play to ensure the correct operation, interoperability and resilience of this paradigm.

Despite the complexities of the scenarios envisioned by the IoT [5], the realisation of this paradigm can be achieved with three main, non-trivial architectural components: smart things, backend servers and communications infrastructure (as depicted in Figure 1). One of the challenges in these scenarios is to enable the connection of everyday objects to the Internet. However, the IoT is not only about connectivity, it is about the pervasive collection and sharing of data towards a common goal. Therefore, smart sensing technologies are undeniably one of the key enablers of this paradigm.