Safeguarding User Privacy of IoT Data in Smart Cities

Prof. Prashant SHENOY
Professor and Associate Dean, College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Abstract

The rise of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) holds great promise to transform people's lives by making society more efficient in many areas, including energy, transportation, healthcare, commerce, manufacturing, etc. At their core, IoT devices use sensors to collect data on real-world physical processes and then transmit it over the Internet to cloud servers, which store, process, and learn from the data to better optimize these processes, either directly (by issuing remote commands that actuate IoT devices) or indirectly (by issuing notifications that direct users to take some action). Unfortunately, IoT devices also expose users to multiple new types of privacy attacks. In particular, the sensor data collected from IoT devices can indirectly reveal a variety of sensitive private information. In addition, users generally connect IoT devices to local networks, which they implicitly trust, with little understanding of what the IoT device is doing on the network.

In this talk, I discuss recent work on sensor data privacy in the context of smart cities to provide examples of i) the surprising types of private information we can glean from seemingly innocuous IoT data and ii) the different types of defenses that we have developed to preserve IoT data privacy for smart energy systems. These defenses lie at different discrete points in the tradeoff between user privacy and IoT functionality, which motivates ongoing work on developing defenses that provide a more tunable tradeoff. I will also discuss the privacy implications of connecting tens-to-hundreds of untrusted IoT devices to implicitly trusted local networks, and avenues for research to mitigate these concerns.

Biography

Prashant Shenoy is currently a Professor and Associate Dean in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received the B.Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and the M.S and Ph.D degrees in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests lie in distributed systems and networking, with a recent emphasis on cloud and green computing. He has been the recipient of several best paper awards at leading conferences, including a Sigmetrics Test of Time Award. He serves on editorial boards of the several journals and has served as the program chair of over a dozen ACM and IEEE conferences. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS and a distinguished member of the ACM.