On the estimation and secrecy capabilities of stochastic encryption for parameter estimation in IoT
Ananth Narayan Samudrala, Rick S. Blum · 2018
In Internet of Things (IoT) applications requiring parameter estimation, sensors often transmit quantized observations to a fusion center through a wireless medium where the observations are susceptible to unauthorized eavesdropping. The fusion center uses the received data to estimate desired parameters. To provide security to such networks, some low complexity encryption approaches have been proposed. In this paper, we generalize those approaches and present an analysis of their estimation and secrecy capabilities. We show that the dimension of the unknown parameter that can be efficiently estimated using an unbiased estimator when using these approaches, is upper bounded. Assuming that an unauthorized eavesdropper is aware of the low complexity encryption process but is unaware of the encryption key, we show successful eavesdropping, even with a large number of observations, is impossible with unbiased estimators and independent observations for these approaches. Numerical results validating our analysis are presented.