Privacy Preserving Threat Hunting in Smart Home Environments

The recent proliferation of smart home environments offers new and transformative circumstances for various domains with a commitment to enhancing the quality of life and experience. Most of these environments combine different gadgets offered by multiple stakeholders in a dynamic and decentralized manner, which in turn presents new challenges from the perspective of digital investigation. In addition, a plentiful amount of data records got generated because of the day to day interactions between these gadgets and homeowners, which poses difficulty in managing and analyzing such data. The analysts should endorse new digital investigation approaches to tackle the current limitations in traditional approaches when used in these environments. The digital evidence in such environments can be found inside the records of logfiles that store the historical events occurred inside the smart home. Threat hunting can leverage the collective nature of these gadgets to gain deeper insights into the best way for responding to new threats, which in turn can be valuable in reducing the impact of breaches. Nevertheless, this approach depends mainly on the readiness of smart homeowners to share their own personal usage logs that have been extracted from their smart home environments. However, they might disincline to employ such service due to the sensitive nature of the information logged by their personal gateways. In this paper, we presented an approach to enable smart homeowners to share their usage logs in a privacy preserving manner. A distributed threat hunting approach has been developed to permit the composition of diverse threat classes without revealing the logged records to other involved parties. Furthermore, a scenario was proposed to depict a proactive threat Intelligence sharing for the detection of potential threats in smart home environments with some experimental results.Comment: In Proc. the International Conference on Advances in Cyber Security, Penang, Malaysia, July 201

A fog based middleware for automated compliance with OECD privacy principles in Internet of Healthcare Things

Cloud-based healthcare service with the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) is a model for healthcare delivery for urban areas and vulnerable population that utilizes the digital communications and the IoHT to provide flexible opportunities to transform all the health data into workable, personalized health insights, and help attain wellness outside the traditional hospital setting. This model of healthcare Web services acts like a living organism, taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by running in cloud infrastructure to connect patients and providers anywhere and anytime to improve the quality of care, with the IoHT, acting as a central nervous system for this model that measures patients' vital statistics, constantly logging their health data, and report any abnormalities to the relevant healthcare provider. However, it is crucial to preserve the privacy of patients while utilizing this model so as to maintain their satisfaction and trust in the offered services. With the increasing number of cases for privacy breaches of healthcare data, different countries and corporations have issued privacy laws and regulations to define the best practices for the protection of personal health information. The health insurance portability and accountability act and the privacy principles established by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are examples of such regulation frameworks. In this paper, we assert that utilizing the cloud-based healthcare services to generate accurate health insights are feasible, while preserving the privacy of the end-users' sensitive health information, which will be residing on a clear form only on his/her own personal gateway. To support this claim, the personal gateways at the end-users' side will act as intermediate nodes (called fog nodes) between the IoHT devices and the cloud-based healthcare services. In such solution, these fog nodes will host a holistic privacy middleware that executes a two-stage concealment process within a distributed data collection protocol that utilizes the hierarchical nature of the IoHT devices. This will unburden the constrained IoHT devices from performing intensive privacy preserving processes. Additionally, the proposed solution complies with one of the common privacy regulation frameworks for fair information practice in a natural and functional way-which is OECD privacy principles. We depicted how the proposed approach can be integrated into a scenario related to preserving the privacy of the users' health data that is utilized by a cloud-based healthcare recommender service in order to generate accurate referrals. Our holistic approach induces a straightforward solution with accurate results, which are beneficial to both end-users and service providers

Cognitive privacy middleware for deep learning mashup in environmental IoT

Data mashup is a Web technology that combines information from multiple sources into a single Web application. Mashup applications support new services, such as environmental monitoring. The different organizations utilize data mashup services to merge data sets from the different Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) context-based services in order to leverage the performance of their data analytics. However, mashup, different data sets from multiple sources, is a privacy hazard as it might reveal citizens specific behaviors in different regions. In this paper, we present our efforts to build a cognitive-based middleware for private data mashup (CMPM) to serve a centralized environmental monitoring service. The proposed middleware is equipped with concealment mechanisms to preserve the privacy of the merged data sets from multiple IoMT networks involved in the mashup application. In addition, we presented an IoT-enabled data mashup service, where the multimedia data are collected from the various IoMT platforms, and then fed into an environmental deep learning service in order to detect interesting patterns in hazardous areas. The viable features within each region were extracted using a multiresolution wavelet transform, and then fed into a discriminative classifier to extract various patterns. We also provide a scenario for IoMT-enabled data mashup service and experimentation results

Photo collage-based photograph display system on mobile computing platform

In the last few decades, mobile computing platform technology has grown rapidly, as observed from smart phones that have quickly become ubiquitous. The mobile computing platform is the most widely used platform in our life today, and digital photographs captured through these devices have become routine for most people. In this study, we propose a novel artistic method for displaying photographs in mobile devices as a photo collage. Using our system, users can view a representative photograph as a collage of photographs associated with a certain event and access each of photographs individually. To implement this, we employ centroidal Voronoi diagram to obtain an even distribution of tiles, and use the sites as the location of tiles. We use the edge avoidance technique to prevent tiles from being located across the edges. To obtain the direction of tiles that follow near a strong edge, we employ the Edge tangent Flow field and use the field as the directions of tiles. Finally, we search for photographs that best match the tiles calculated above by using a thumbnail difference metric