Privacy-preserving targeted advertising scheme for IPTV using the cloud

In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving scheme for targeted advertising via the Internet Protocol TV (IPTV). The scheme uses a communication model involving a collection of viewers/subscribers, a content provider (IPTV), an advertiser, and a cloud server. To provide high quality directed advertising service, the advertiser can utilize not only demographic information of subscribers, but also their watching habits. The latter includes watching history, preferences for IPTV content and watching rate, which are published on the cloud server periodically (e.g. weekly) along with anonymized demographics. Since the published data may leak sensitive information about subscribers, it is safeguarded using cryptographic techniques in addition to the anonymization of demographics. The techniques used by the advertiser, which can be manifested in its queries to the cloud, are considered (trade) secrets and therefore are protected as well. The cloud is oblivious to the published data, the queries of the advertiser as well as its own responses to these queries. Only a legitimate advertiser, endorsed with a so-called {\em trapdoor} by the IPTV, can query the cloud and utilize the query results. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated with experiments, which show that the scheme is suitable for practical usage

Identity, location and query privacy for smart devices

In this thesis, we have discussed three important aspects of users\u27 privacy namely, location privacy, identity privacy and query privacy. The information related to identity, location and query is very sensitive as it can reveal behavior patterns, interests, preferences and habits of the users. We have proposed several techniques in the thesis on how to better protect the identity, location and query privacy

Practical Isolated Searchable Encryption in a Trusted Computing Environment

Cloud computing has become a standard computational paradigm due its numerous advantages, including high availability, elasticity, and ubiquity. Both individual users and companies are adopting more of its services, but not without loss of privacy and control. Outsourcing data and computations to a remote server implies trusting its owners, a problem many end-users are aware. Recent news have proven data stored on Cloud servers is susceptible to leaks from the provider, third-party attackers, or even from government surveillance programs, exposing users’ private data. Different approaches to tackle these problems have surfaced throughout the years. Naïve solutions involve storing data encrypted on the server, decrypting it only on the client-side. Yet, this imposes a high overhead on the client, rendering such schemes impractical. Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) has emerged as a novel research topic in recent years, allowing efficient querying and updating over encrypted datastores in Cloud servers, while retaining privacy guarantees. Still, despite relevant recent advances, existing SSE schemes still make a critical trade-off between efficiency, security, and query expressiveness, thus limiting their adoption as a viable technology, particularly in large-scale scenarios. New technologies providing Isolated Execution Environments (IEEs) may help improve SSE literature. These technologies allow applications to be run remotely with privacy guarantees, in isolation from other, possibly privileged, processes inside the CPU, such as the operating system kernel. Prominent example technologies are Intel SGX and ARM TrustZone, which are being made available in today’s commodity CPUs. In this thesis we study these new trusted hardware technologies in depth, while exploring their application to the problem of searching over encrypted data, primarily focusing in SGX. In more detail, we study the application of IEEs in SSE schemes, improving their efficiency, security, and query expressiveness. We design, implement, and evaluate three new SSE schemes for different query types, namely Boolean queries over text, similarity queries over image datastores, and multimodal queries over text and images. These schemes can support queries combining different media formats simultaneously, envisaging applications such as privacy-enhanced medical diagnosis and management of electronic-healthcare records, or confidential photograph catalogues, running without the danger of privacy breaks in Cloud-based provisioned services

Systematic Review on Security and Privacy Requirements in Edge Computing: State of the Art and Future Research Opportunities

Edge computing is a promising paradigm that enhances the capabilities of cloud computing. In order to continue patronizing the computing services, it is essential to conserve a good atmosphere free from all kinds of security and privacy breaches. The security and privacy issues associated with the edge computing environment have narrowed the overall acceptance of the technology as a reliable paradigm. Many researchers have reviewed security and privacy issues in edge computing, but not all have fully investigated the security and privacy requirements. Security and privacy requirements are the objectives that indicate the capabilities as well as functions a system performs in eliminating certain security and privacy vulnerabilities. The paper aims to substantially review the security and privacy requirements of the edge computing and the various technological methods employed by the techniques used in curbing the threats, with the aim of helping future researchers in identifying research opportunities. This paper investigate the current studies and highlights the following: (1) the classification of security and privacy requirements in edge computing, (2) the state of the art techniques deployed in curbing the security and privacy threats, (3) the trends of technological methods employed by the techniques, (4) the metrics used for evaluating the performance of the techniques, (5) the taxonomy of attacks affecting the edge network, and the corresponding technological trend employed in mitigating the attacks, and, (6) research opportunities for future researchers in the area of edge computing security and privacy