Adaptive blurring of sensor data to balance privacy and utility for ubiquitous services

Assaad Moawad, Thomas Hartmann, Francois Fouquet, Jacques Klein, Yves Le Traon
2015 Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing - SAC '15  
Given the trend towards mobile computing, the next generation of ubiquitous "smart" services will have to continuously analyze surrounding sensor data. More than ever, such services will rely on data potentially related to personal activities to perform their tasks, e.g. to predict urban traffic or local weather conditions. However, revealing personal data inevitably entails privacy risks, especially when data is shared with high precision and frequency. For example, by analyzing the precise
more » ... ctric consumption data, it can be inferred if a person is currently at home, however this can empower new services such as a smart heating system. Access control (forbid or grant access) or anonymization techniques are not able to deal with such trade-off because whether they completely prohibit access to data or lose source traceability. Blurring techniques, by tuning data quality, offer a wide range of trade-offs between privacy and utility for services. However, the amount of ubiquitous services and their data quality requirements lead to an explosion of possible configurations of blurring algorithms. To manage this complexity, in this paper we propose a platform that automatically adapts (at runtime) blurring components between data owners and data consumers (services). The platform searches the optimal trade-off between service utility and privacy risks using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to adapt the underlying communication platform. We evaluate our approach on a sensor network gateway and show its suitability in terms of i) effectiveness to find an appropriate solution, ii) efficiency and scalability.
doi:10.1145/2695664.2695855 dblp:conf/sac/Moawad0FKT15 fatcat:ln54qlttpvbn5kdinas7zjxprq