User-centric Privacy Engineering for the Internet of Things

User privacy concerns are widely regarded as a key obstacle to the success of modern smart cyber-physical systems. In this paper, we analyse, through an example, some of the requirements that future data collection architectures of these systems should implement to provide effective privacy protection for users. Then, we give an example of how these requirements can be implemented in a smart home scenario. Our example architecture allows the user to balance the privacy risks with the potential benefits and take a practical decision determining the extent of the sharing. Based on this example architecture, we identify a number of challenges that must be addressed by future data processing systems in order to achieve effective privacy management for smart cyber-physical systems.Comment: 12 Page

Trust based Privacy Policy Enforcement in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing offers opportunities for organizations to reduce IT costs by using the computation and storage of a remote provider. Despite the benefits offered by cloud computing paradigm, organizations are still wary of delegating their computation and storage to a cloud service provider due to trust concerns. The trust issues with the cloud can be addressed by a combination of regulatory frameworks and supporting technologies. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and remote attestation provide the technologies for addressing the trust concerns. PET provides proactive measures through cryptography and selective dissemination of data to the client. Remote attestation mechanisms provides reactive measures by enabling the client to remotely verify if a provider is compromised. The contributions of this work are three fold. This thesis explores the PET landscape by studying in detail the implications of using PET in cloud architectures. The practicality of remote attestation in Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) scenarios is also analyzed and improvements have been proposed to the state of the art. This thesis also propose a fresh look at trust relationships in cloud computing, where a single provider changes its configuration for each client based on the subjective and dynamic trust assessments of clients. We conclude by proposing a plan for expanding on the completed work

Secure Cloud-Edge Deployments, with Trust

Assessing the security level of IoT applications to be deployed to heterogeneous Cloud-Edge infrastructures operated by different providers is a non-trivial task. In this article, we present a methodology that permits to express security requirements for IoT applications, as well as infrastructure security capabilities, in a simple and declarative manner, and to automatically obtain an explainable assessment of the security level of the possible application deployments. The methodology also considers the impact of trust relations among different stakeholders using or managing Cloud-Edge infrastructures. A lifelike example is used to showcase the prototyped implementation of the methodology

Furthering the Growth of Cloud Computing by Providing Privacy as a Service

The evolution of Cloud Computing as a viable business solution for providing hardware and software has created many security concerns. Among these security concerns, privacy is often overlooked. If Cloud Computing is to continue its growth, this privacy concern will need to be addressed. In this work we discuss the current growth of Cloud Computing and the impact the public sector and privacy can have in furthering this growth. To begin to provide privacy protection for Cloud Computing, we introduce privacy constraints that outline privacy preferences. We propose the expansion of Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to include these privacy constraints as Quality of Service (QoS) levels. This privacy QoS must be agreed upon along with the rest of the QoS terms within the SLA by the Cloud consumer and provider. Finally, we introduce Privacy as a Service (PraaS) to monitor the agreement and provide enforcement if necessary