Privacy Preserving Data Publishing

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest among researchers in protecting individual privacy in the big data era, involving social media, genomics, and Internet of Things. Recent studies have revealed numerous privacy threats and privacy protection methodologies, that vary across a broad range of applications. To date, however, there exists no powerful methodologies in addressing challenges from: high-dimension data, high-correlation data and powerful attackers. In this dissertation, two critical problems will be investigated: the prospects and some challenges for elucidating the attack capabilities of attackers in mining individuals’ private information; and methodologies that can be used to protect against such inference attacks, while guaranteeing significant data utility. First, this dissertation has proposed a series of works regarding inference attacks laying emphasis on protecting against powerful adversaries with auxiliary information. In the context of genomic data, data dimensions and computation feasibility is highly challenging in conducting data analysis. This dissertation proved that the proposed attack can effectively infer the values of the unknown SNPs and traits in linear complexity, which dramatically improve the computation cost compared with traditional methods with exponential computation cost. Second, putting differential privacy guarantee into high-dimension and high-correlation data remains a challenging problem, due to high-sensitivity, output scalability and signal-to-noise ratio. Consider there are tens-of-millions of genomes in a human DNA, it is infeasible for traditional methods to introduce noise to sanitize genomic data. This dissertation has proposed a series of works and demonstrated that the proposed differentially private method satisfies differential privacy; moreover, data utility is improved compared with the states of the arts by largely lowering data sensitivity. Third, putting privacy guarantee into social data publishing remains a challenging problem, due to tradeoff requirements between data privacy and utility. This dissertation has proposed a series of works and demonstrated that the proposed methods can effectively realize privacy-utility tradeoff in data publishing. Finally, two future research topics are proposed. The first topic is about Privacy Preserving Data Collection and Processing for Internet of Things. The second topic is to study Privacy Preserving Big Data Aggregation. They are motivated by the newly proposed data mining, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity methods

Differentially Private Recommendation System Based on Community Detection in Social Network Applications

The recommender system is mainly used in the e-commerce platform. With the development of the Internet, social networks and e-commerce networks have broken each other’s boundaries. Users also post information about their favorite movies or books on social networks. With the enhancement of people’s privacy awareness, the personal information of many users released publicly is limited. In the absence of items rating and knowing some user information, we propose a novel recommendation method. This method provides a list of recommendations for target attributes based on community detection and known user attributes and links. Considering the recommendation list and published user information that may be exploited by the attacker to infer other sensitive information of users and threaten users’ privacy, we propose the CDAI (Infer Attributes based on Community Detection) method, which finds a balance between utility and privacy and provides users with safer recommendations

An Energy Efficient Privacy-Preserving Content Sharing Scheme in Mobile Social Networks

The rising popularity of mobile social media enables personalization of various content sharing and subscribing services. These two types of services entail serious privacy concerns not only to the confidentiality of shared content, but also to the privacy of end users such as their identities, interests and social relationships. Previous works established on the attribute-based encryption (ABE) can provide fine-grained access control of content. However, practical privacy-preserving content sharing in mobile social networks either incurs great risk of information leaking to unauthorized third parties or suffers from high energy consumption for decrypting privacy-preserving content. Motivated by these issues, this paper proposes a publish–subscribe system with secure proxy decryption (PSSPD) in mobile social networks. First, an effective self-contained privacy-preserving access control method is introduced to protect the confidentiality of the content and the credentials of users. This method is based on ciphertext-policy ABE and public-key encryption with keyword search. After that, a secure proxy decryption mechanism is proposed to reduce the heavy burdens of energy consumption on performing ciphertext decryption at end users. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and privacy preservation effectiveness of PSSPD