Dynamic inference control in privacy preference enforcement

Abstract

In pervasive (ubiquitous) environments, context-aware agents are used to obtain, understand, and share local contexts with each other so that the environments could be integrated seamlessly. Context sharing among agents should be made privacy-conscious. Privacy preferences are generally specified to regulate the exchange of the contexts, where who have rights under what conditions to have what contexts are designated. However, released contexts could be used to infer those unreleased. In particular, different contexts released could endanger the security of different contexts unreleased. The existing privacy preference specification platforms do not have a mechanism to prevent inference. To date, there have been very few inference control mechanisms specifically tailored to context management in pervasive (ubiquitous) environments. A Bayesian network based mechanism has been proposed to prevent privacy-sensitive contexts from being inferred from those to be released. Nevertheless, contexts in pervasive (ubiquitous) environments could change from time to time and are history dependent. In this paper, we propose to use dynamic Bayesian networks to track the most updated beliefs of the adversaries about the dynamic domains in order to evaluate which contexts in the domains could be released safely in various situations.