User-driven Privacy Enforcement for Cloud-based Services in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things devices are envisioned to penetrate essentially all aspects of life, including homes and urbanspaces, in use cases such as health care, assisted living, and smart cities. One often proposed solution for dealing with the massive amount of data collected by these devices and offering services on top of them is the federation of the Internet of Things and cloud computing. However, user acceptance of such systems is a critical factor that hinders the adoption of this promising approach due to severe privacy concerns. We present UPECSI, an approach for user-driven privacy enforcement for cloud-based services in the Internet of Things to address this critical factor. UPECSI enables enforcement of all privacy requirements of the user once her sensitive data leaves the border of her network, provides a novel approach for the integration of privacy functionality into the development process of cloud-based services, and offers the user an adaptable and transparent configuration of her privacy requirements. Hence, UPECSI demonstrates an approach for realizing user-accepted cloud services in the Internet of Things.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 listing. The 2nd International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud-2014

SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators

Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users' productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit

Towards More Security in Data Exchange : Defining Unparsers with Context-Sensitive Encoders for Context-Free Grammars

To exchange complex data structures in distributed systems, documents written in context-free languages are exchanged among communicating parties. Unparsing these documents correctly is as important as parsing them correctly because errors during unparsing result in injection vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection. Injection attacks are not limited to the web world. Every program that uses input to produce documents in a context-free language may be vulnerable to this class of attack. Even for widely used languages such as HTML and JavaScript, there are few approaches that prevent injection attacks by context-sensitive encoding, and those approaches are tied to the language. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to derive context-sensitive encoder from context-free grammars to provide correct unparsing of maliciously crafted input data for all context-free languages. The presented solution integrates encoder definition into context-free grammars and provides a generator for context-sensitive encoders and decoders that are used during (un)parsing. This unparsing process results in documents where the input data does neither influence the structure of the document nor change their intended semantics. By defining encoding during language definition, developers who use the language are provided with a clean interface for writing and reading documents written in that language, without the need to care about security-relevant encoding.Comment: 8 pages, 4 listing

Generating Domain-Specific Transformation Languages for Component & Connector Architecture Descriptions

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) decomposes complex systems into reusable components. Model-driven engineering (MDE) aims to abstract from complexities by lifting abstract models to primary development artifacts. Component and connector architecture description languages (ADLs) combine CBSE and MDE to describe software systems as hierarchies of component models. Using models as development artifacts is accompanied with the need to evolve, maintain and refactor those models, which can be achieved by model transformations. Domain-specific transformation languages (DSTLs) are tailored to a specific modeling language as the modeling language's concrete syntax is used to describe transformations. To automate the development of DSTLs for ADLs, we present a framework to systematically derive such languages from domain-specific C&C language grammars. These DSTLs enable to describe such model transformations concisely in vocabulary of the underlying ADL. These domain-specific transformations are better comprehensible to ADL experts than generic transformations.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures in 2nd International Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for Component-Based Software Systems (ModComp), 201

A comprehensive approach to privacy in the cloud-based Internet of Things

In the near future, the Internet of Things is expected to penetrate all aspects of the physical world, including homes and urban spaces. In order to handle the massive amount of data that becomes collectible and to offer services on top of this data, the most convincing solution is the federation of the Internet of Things and cloud computing. Yet, the wide adoption of this promising vision, especially for application areas such as pervasive health care, assisted living, and smart cities, is hindered by severe privacy concerns of the individual users. Hence, user acceptance is a critical factor to turn this vision into reality. To address this critical factor and thus realize the cloud-based Internet of Things for a variety of different application areas, we present our comprehensive approach to privacy in this envisioned setting. We allow an individual user to enforce all her privacy requirements before any sensitive data is uploaded to the cloud, enable developers of cloud services to integrate privacy functionality already into the development process of cloud services, and offer users a transparent and adaptable interface for configuring their privacy requirements