Emerging privacy challenges and approaches in CAV systems

The growth of Internet-connected devices, Internet-enabled services and Internet of Things systems continues at a rapid pace, and their application to transport systems is heralded as game-changing. Numerous developing CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicle) functions, such as traffic planning, optimisation, management, safety-critical and cooperative autonomous driving applications, rely on data from various sources. The efficacy of these functions is highly dependent on the dimensionality, amount and accuracy of the data being shared. It holds, in general, that the greater the amount of data available, the greater the efficacy of the function. However, much of this data is privacy-sensitive, including personal, commercial and research data. Location data and its correlation with identity and temporal data can help infer other personal information, such as home/work locations, age, job, behavioural features, habits, social relationships. This work categorises the emerging privacy challenges and solutions for CAV systems and identifies the knowledge gap for future research, which will minimise and mitigate privacy concerns without hampering the efficacy of the functions

User-centric privacy preservation in Internet of Things Networks

Recent trends show how the Internet of Things (IoT) and its services are becoming more omnipresent and popular. The end-to-end IoT services that are extensively used include everything from neighborhood discovery to smart home security systems, wearable health monitors, and connected appliances and vehicles. IoT leverages different kinds of networks like Location-based social networks, Mobile edge systems, Digital Twin Networks, and many more to realize these services. Many of these services rely on a constant feed of user information. Depending on the network being used, how this data is processed can vary significantly. The key thing to note is that so much data is collected, and users have little to no control over how extensively their data is used and what information is being used. This causes many privacy concerns, especially for a na ̈ıve user who does not know the implications and consequences of severe privacy breaches. When designing privacy policies, we need to understand the different user data types used in these networks. This includes user profile information, information from their queries used to get services (communication privacy), and location information which is much needed in many on-the-go services. Based on the context of the application, and the service being provided, the user data at risk and the risks themselves vary. First, we dive deep into the networks and understand the different aspects of privacy for user data and the issues faced in each such aspect. We then propose different privacy policies for these networks and focus on two main aspects of designing privacy mechanisms: The quality of service the user expects and the private information from the user’s perspective. The novel contribution here is to focus on what the user thinks and needs instead of fixating on designing privacy policies that only satisfy the third-party applications’ requirement of quality of service

Differential Privacy for Industrial Internet of Things: Opportunities, Applications and Challenges

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) brings new changes to various fields. Particularly, industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is promoting a new round of industrial revolution. With more applications of IIoT, privacy protection issues are emerging. Specially, some common algorithms in IIoT technology such as deep models strongly rely on data collection, which leads to the risk of privacy disclosure. Recently, differential privacy has been used to protect user-terminal privacy in IIoT, so it is necessary to make in-depth research on this topic. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the opportunities, applications and challenges of differential privacy in IIoT. We firstly review related papers on IIoT and privacy protection, respectively. Then we focus on the metrics of industrial data privacy, and analyze the contradiction between data utilization for deep models and individual privacy protection. Several valuable problems are summarized and new research ideas are put forward. In conclusion, this survey is dedicated to complete comprehensive summary and lay foundation for the follow-up researches on industrial differential privacy

Privacy and security in cyber-physical systems

Data privacy has attracted increasing attention in the past decade due to the emerging technologies that require our data to provide utility. Service providers (SPs) encourage users to share their personal data in return for a better user experience. However, users' raw data usually contains implicit sensitive information that can be inferred by a third party. This raises great concern about users' privacy. In this dissertation, we develop novel techniques to achieve a better privacy-utility trade-off (PUT) in various applications. We first consider smart meter (SM) privacy and employ physical resources to minimize the information leakage to the SP through SM readings. We measure privacy using information-theoretic metrics and find private data release policies (PDRPs) by formulating the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). We also propose noise injection techniques for time-series data privacy. We characterize optimal PDRPs measuring privacy via mutual information (MI) and utility loss via added distortion. Reformulating the problem as an MDP, we solve it using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for real location trace data. We also consider a scenario for hiding an underlying ``sensitive'' variable and revealing a ``useful'' variable for utility by periodically selecting from among sensors to share the measurements with an SP. We formulate this as an optimal stopping problem and solve using DRL. We then consider privacy-aware communication over a wiretap channel. We maximize the information delivered to the legitimate receiver, while minimizing the information leakage from the sensitive attribute to the eavesdropper. We propose using a variational-autoencoder (VAE) and validate our approach with colored and annotated MNIST dataset. Finally, we consider defenses against active adversaries in the context of security-critical applications. We propose an adversarial example (AE) generation method exploiting the data distribution. We perform adversarial training using the proposed AEs and evaluate the performance against real-world adversarial attacks.Open Acces

Privacy In Multi-Agent And Dynamical Systems

The use of private data is pivotal for numerous services including location--based ones, collaborative recommender systems, and social networks. Despite the utility these services provide, the usage of private data raises privacy concerns to their owners. Noise--injecting techniques, such as differential privacy, address these concerns by adding artificial noise such that an adversary with access to the published response cannot confidently infer the private data. Particularly, in multi--agent and dynamical environments, privacy--preserving techniques need to be expressive enough to capture time--varying privacy needs, multiple data owners, and multiple data users. Current work in differential privacy assumes that a single response gets published and a single predefined privacy guarantee is provided. This work relaxes these assumptions by providing several problem formulations and their approaches. In the setting of a social network, a data owner has different privacy needs against different users. We design a coalition--free privacy--preserving mechanism that allows a data owner to diffuse their private data over a network. We also formulate the problem of multiple data owners that provide their data to multiple data users. Also, for time--varying privacy needs, we prove that, for a class of existing privacy--preserving mechanism, it is possible to effectively relax privacy constraints gradually. Additionally, we provide a privacy--aware mechanism for time--varying private data, where we wish to protect only the current value of it. Finally, in the context of location--based services, we provide a mechanism where the strength of the privacy guarantees varies with the local population density. These contributions increase the applicability of differential privacy and set future directions for more flexible and expressive privacy guarantees