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

Privacy Preserving Attribute-Focused Anonymization Scheme for Healthcare Data Publishing

Advancements in Industry 4.0 brought tremendous improvements in the healthcare sector, such as better quality of treatment, enhanced communication, remote monitoring, and reduced cost. Sharing healthcare data with healthcare providers is crucial for harnessing the benefits of such improvements. In general, healthcare data holds sensitive information about individuals. Hence, sharing such data is challenging because of various security and privacy issues. According to privacy regulations and ethical requirements, it is essential to preserve the privacy of patients before sharing data for medical research. State-of-the-art literature on privacy preserving studies either uses cryptographic approaches to protect the privacy or uses anonymizing techniques regardless of the type of attributes, this results in poor protection and data utility. In this paper, we propose an attribute-focused privacy preserving data publishing scheme. The proposed scheme is two-fold, comprising a fixed-interval approach to protect numerical attributes and an improved l -diverse slicing approach to protect the categorical and sensitive attributes. In the fixed-interval approach, the original values of the healthcare data are replaced with an equivalent computed value. The improved l -diverse slicing approach partitions the data both horizontally and vertically to avoid privacy leaks. Extensive experiments with real-world datasets are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The classification models built on anonymized dataset yields approximately 13% better accuracy than benchmarked algorithms. Experimental analyses show that the average information loss which is measured by normalized certainty penalty (NCP) is reduced by 12% compared to similar approaches. The attribute focused scheme not only provides data utility but also prevents the data from membership disclosures, attribute disclosures, and identity disclosures

Mobility Support 5G Architecture with Real-Time Routing for Sustainable Smart Cities

[EN] The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology and provides connectivity among physical objects with the support of 5G communication. In recent decades, there have been a lot of applications based on IoT technology for the sustainability of smart cities, such as farming, e-healthcare, education, smart homes, weather monitoring, etc. These applications communicate in a collaborative manner between embedded IoT devices and systematize daily routine tasks. In the literature, many solutions facilitate remote users to gather the observed data by accessing the stored information on the cloud network and lead to smart systems. However, most of the solutions raise significant research challenges regarding information sharing in mobile IoT networks and must be able to stabilize the performance of smart operations in terms of security and intelligence. Many solutions are based on 5G communication to support high user mobility and increase the connectivity among a huge number of IoT devices. However, such approaches lack user and data privacy against anonymous threats and incur resource costs. In this paper, we present a mobility support 5G architecture with real-time routing for sustainable smart cities that aims to decrease the loss of data against network disconnectivity and increase the reliability for 5G-based public healthcare networks. The proposed architecture firstly establishes a mutual relationship among the nodes and mobile sink with shared secret information and lightweight processing. Secondly, multi-secured levels are proposed to protect the interaction with smart transmission systems by increasing the trust threshold over the insecure channels. The conducted experiments are analyzed, and it is concluded that their performance significantly increases the information sustainability for mobile networks in terms of security and routing.Rehman, A.; Haseeb, K.; Saba, T.; Lloret, J.; Ahmed, Z. (2021). Mobility Support 5G Architecture with Real-Time Routing for Sustainable Smart Cities. Sustainability. 13(16):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169092S116131

Trading Indistinguishability-based Privacy and Utility of Complex Data

The collection and processing of complex data, like structured data or infinite streams, facilitates novel applications. At the same time, it raises privacy requirements by the data owners. Consequently, data administrators use privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to sanitize the data, that are frequently based on indistinguishability-based privacy definitions. Upon engineering PETs, a well-known challenge is the privacy-utility trade-off. Although literature is aware of a couple of trade-offs, there are still combinations of involved entities, privacy definition, type of data and application, in which we miss valuable trade-offs. In this thesis, for two important groups of applications processing complex data, we study (a) which indistinguishability-based privacy and utility requirements are relevant, (b) whether existing PETs solve the trade-off sufficiently, and (c) propose novel PETs extending the state-of-the-art substantially in terms of methodology, as well as achieved privacy or utility. Overall, we provide four contributions divided into two parts. In the first part, we study applications that analyze structured data with distance-based mining algorithms. We reveal that an essential utility requirement is the preservation of the pair-wise distances of the data items. Consequently, we propose distance-preserving encryption (DPE), together with a general procedure to engineer respective PETs by leveraging existing encryption schemes. As proof of concept, we apply it to SQL log mining, useful for database performance tuning. In the second part, we study applications that monitor query results over infinite streams. To this end, -event differential privacy is state-of-the-art. Here, PETs use mechanisms that typically add noise to query results. First, we study state-of-the-art mechanisms with respect to the utility they provide. Conducting the so far largest benchmark that fulfills requirements derived from limitations of prior experimental studies, we contribute new insights into the strengths and weaknesses of existing mechanisms. One of the most unexpected, yet explainable result, is a baseline supremacy. It states that one of the two baseline mechanisms delivers high or even the best utility. A natural follow-up question is whether baseline mechanisms already provide reasonable utility. So, second, we perform a case study from the area of electricity grid monitoring revealing two results. First, achieving reasonable utility is only possible under weak privacy requirements. Second, the utility measured with application-specific utility metrics decreases faster than the sanitization error, that is used as utility metric in most studies, suggests. As a third contribution, we propose a novel differential privacy-based privacy definition called Swellfish privacy. It allows tuning utility beyond incremental -event mechanism design by supporting time-dependent privacy requirements. Formally, as well as by experiments, we prove that it increases utility significantly. In total, our thesis contributes substantially to the research field, and reveals directions for future research

Automated labeling of unknown contracts in Ethereum

yesSmart contracts have recently attracted interest from diverse fields including law and finance. Ethereum in particular has grown rapidly to accommodate an entire ecosystem of contracts which run using its own crypto-currency. Smart contract developers can opt to verify their contracts so that any user can inspect and audit the code before executing the contract. However, the huge numbers of deployed smart contracts and the lack of supporting tools for the analysis of smart contracts makes it very challenging to get insights into this eco-environment, where code gets executed through transactions performing value transfer of a crypto-currency. We address this problem and report on the use of unsupervised clustering techniques and a seed set of verified contracts, in this work we propose a framework to group together similar contracts within the Ethereum network using only the contracts publicly available compiled code. We report qualitative and quantitative results on a dataset and provide the dataset and project code to the research community.Link to conference webpage: http://icccn.org/icccn17/workshop

An Efficient Method to Enhance Health Care Big Data Security in Cloud Computing Using the Combination of Euclidean Neural Network And K-Medoids Based Twin Fish Cipher Cryptographic Algorithm

Big data is a phrase that refers to the large volumes of digital data that are being generated as a consequence of technology improvements in the health care industry, e-commerce, and research, among other fields. It is impossible to analyze Big Data using typical analytic tools since traditional data storage systems do not have the capacity to deal with such a large volume of data. Cloud computing has made it more easier for people to store and process data remotely in recent years. By distributing large data sets over a network of cloudlets, cloud computing can address the challenges of managing, storing, and analyzing this new breed of data It's possible for private data to be leaked when it is kept in the cloud, as users have no control over it. This paper proposes a framework for a secure data storage by using the K-medoids-based twin fish cipher cryptographic algorithm. We first normalize the data using the Filter splash Z normalization and then apply the Euclidean neural network to compute similarity, which ensures data correctness and reduces computational cost. As a result, the suggested encryption strategy is used to encrypt and decode the outsourced data, thereby protecting private information from being exposed. The whole experiment was conducted using health data from a large metropolis from the Kaggle database. Using the recommended encryption method, users will be able to maintain their privacy while saving time and money by storing their large amounts of data on the cloud