Privacy in Cooperative Distributed Systems: Modeling and Protection Framework

A new form of computation is emerging rapidly with cloud computing, mobile computing, wearable computing and the Internet-of-Things. All can be characterized as a class of “Cooperative Distributed Systems” (CDS) in open environment. A major driver of the growth is the exponential adoption by people and organizations within all aspects of their day-to-day matters. In this context, users’ requirements for privacy protection are becoming essential and complex beyond the traditional approaches. This requires a formal treatment of “privacy” as a fundamental computation concept in CDS paradigm. The objective is to develop a comprehensive formal model for “privacy” as base to build a CDS based framework and platform in which various applications allow users to enjoy the comprehensive services in open environments while protecting their privacy seamlessly. To this end, this thesis presents a novel way of understudying, modeling and analyzing privacy concerns in CDS. A formal foundations and model of privacy is developed within the context of information management. This served as a base for developing a privacy protection management framework for CDS. It includes a privacy-aware agent model for CDS platform with the ability to support interaction-based privacy protection. The feasibility of the proposed models has been demonstrated by developing an agent-based CDS platform using JIAC framework and a privacy-based Contract Net Protocol. It also included the application scenarios for the framework for privacy protection is Internet-of-Tings, cloud-based resource scheduling and personal assistance

Privacy in Internet of Things: A Model and Protection Framework

AbstractA new form of computation is being evolved to include massive number of diverse set of conventional computing systems, sensors, devices, equipments, software and information services and apps. This new form of computing environment is known as the “Internet-of-Things” (IoT). The adoption of IoT is fast and the “things” are becoming integral part of people day-to-day life as well as essential elements in the businesses everyday activities and processes. Open characteristics of IoT environments raises privacy concern as “things” are autonomous with some degree of authority to sharing their capabilities and knowledge to fulfil their individual or collective tasks. As such privacy becomes central and an inherit computational aspect of the “things”. The work presented here is based on modelling IoT as Cooperative Distributed Systems (CDS). It proposes a novel approach of analysing and modelling privacy concepts and concerns. Privacy protection is captured as a form of “sensitive information” management at the interaction level. A privacy protection management framework for CDS at the interaction level is proposed. The application of the framework has been demonstrated by extending Contract Net Protocol (CNP) to support privacy protection for CDS