Privacy of Things: Emerging Challenges and Opportunities in Wireless Internet of Things

The proliferation of wireless devices and appliances is facilitating the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT). Numerous state-of-the-art applications are being used in, for example, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and biocomputing. With the popularization of IoT, new challenges are emerging with respect to privacy issues. In this article, we first summarize privacy constraints and primary attacks based on new features of IoT. Then we present three case studies to demonstrate principal vulnerabilities and classify existing protection schemes. Built on this analysis, we identify three key challenges: a lack of theoretical foundation, the trade-off optimization between privacy and data utility, and system isomerism over-complexity and high scalability. Finally, we illustrate possible promising future directions and potential solutions to the emerging challenges facing wireless IoT scenarios. We aim to assist interested readers in investigating the unexplored parts of this promising domain.