Security and Privacy for Sensor Databases

The most compelling sensor technology advances of this decade are deploying wireless networks of heterogeneous smart sensor nodes for complex information gathering tasks. Sensors in wireless sensor networks operate under a set of unique and fundamental constraints that make collaborative information gathering tasks challenging. Sensors in the network simultaneously participate in the collaborative decision making required for aggregation of data in an efficient way. Thus, the study of security and privacy for sensor databases in the context of Sensor Networks is at the very heart of technology advances for the next decade. The intent of this paper is to bring together the fundamental concepts of security and privacy for sensor databases, so the unifying principles and underlying concepts of algorithm design may more easily be structured. We discuss several security issues. These include security policy, security architectures, secure sensor database functions, secure data distribution, the inference problem, the privacy problem, and tradeoffs between security, integrity, fault tolerance and real-time processing for sensor data managers. Next we discuss security issues for sensor databases taking into consideration some unique constraints for sensor networks. Finally we provide directions for future research on security for sensor databases.