On the complexity of privacy-preserving complex event processing

Abstract

Complex Event Processing (CEP) Systems are stream processing systems that monitor incoming event streams in search of userspecified event patterns. While CEP systems have been adopted in a variety of applications, the privacy implications of event pattern reporting mechanisms have yet to be studied - a stark contrast to the significant amount of attention that has been devoted to privacy for relational systems. In this paper we present a privacy problem that arises when the system must support desired patterns (those that should be reported if detected) and private patterns (those that should not be revealed). We formalize this problem, which we term privacy-preserving, utility maximizing CEP (PP-CEP), and analyze its complexity under various assumptions. Our results show that this is a rich problem to study and shed some light on the difficulty of developing algorithms that preserve utility without compromising privacy.