Protecting adaptive sampling from information leakage on low-power sensors

ABSTRACTAdaptive sampling is a powerful family of algorithms for managing energy consumption on low-power sensors. These algorithms use captured measurements to control the sensor's collection rate, leading to near-optimal error under energy constraints. Adaptive sampling's data-driven nature, however, comes at a cost in privacy. In this work, we demonstrate how the collection rates of general adaptive policies leak information about captured measurements. Further, individual adaptive policies display this leakage on multiple tasks. This result presents a challenge in maintaining privacy for sensors using energy-efficient batched communication. In this context, the size of measurement batches exposes the sampling policy's collection rate. Thus, an attacker who monitors the encrypted link between sensor and server can use message lengths to uncover information about the captured values. We address this side-channel by introducing a framework called Adaptive Group Encoding (AGE) that protects any periodic adaptive sampler. AGE uses quantization to encode all batches as fixed-length messages, making message sizes independent of the collection rate. AGE reduces the quantization error through a series of transformations. The proposed framework preserves the low error of adaptive sampling while preventing information leakage and incurring negligible energy overhead.