A Hybrid Approach With GAN and DP for Privacy Preservation of IIoT Data

Abstract

There are emerging trends to use the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in manufacturing and related industries. Machine Learning (ML) techniques are widely used to interpret the collected IoT data for improving the company’s operational excellence and predictive maintenance. In general, ML applications require high computational resource allocation and expertise. Manufacturing companies usually transfer their IIoT data to an ML-enabled third party or a cloud system. ML applications need decrypted data to perform ML tasks efficiently. Therefore, the third parties may have unacceptable access rights during the data processing to the content of IIoT data that contains a portrait of the production process. IIoT data may include hidden sensitive features, creating information leakage for the companies. All these concerns prevent companies from sharing their IIoT data with third parties. This paper proposes a novel method based on the hybrid usage of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Differential Privacy (DP) to preserve sensitive data in IIoT operations. We aim to sustain IIoT data privacy with minimal accuracy loss without adding high additional computational costs to the overall data processing scheme. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with publicly available data sets and a realistic IIoT data set collected from a confectionery production process. We employed well-known privacy six assessment metrics from the literature and measured the efficiency of the proposed technique. We showed, with the help of experiments, that the proposed method preserves the privacy of the data while keeping the Linear Regression (LR) algorithms stable in terms of the R-Squared accuracy metric. The model also ensures privacy protection for hidden sensitive data. In this way, the method prevents the production of hidden sensitive data from the sub-feature sets.