Privacy Protection Requirements Research Articles

Intelligent architecture and platforms for private edge cloud systems: A review

The development of cloud, fog, and edge computing has led to great advances in reducing latency and saving bandwidth, and these methods have therefore been broadly applied in various domains, including healthcare, transportation, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Traditional edge computing solutions have proven to be insufficient in fulfilling the demanding prerequisites of low latency and high data rates. Additionally, publicly available edge cloud solutions fail to meet the required standards for ensuring privacy protection. Consequently, Private Edge Cloud Systems (PECSs) have garnered attention as a prospective solution owing to their capacity to mitigate privacy risks and their significant computing capacity. PECS research has seen significant growth, but there is a lack of detailed review of its issues, approaches, and applications in the literature. To explore the potential application value of PECS, this paper provides a systematic review of intelligent platforms and architecture for PECSs. Specifically, an overview of the fundamental characteristics of PECSs is provided. Second, we classify intelligent platforms and architectures and analyze their implementation techniques and realization methods. Third, we discuss four specific application scenarios. Finally, promising future research directions are discussed. The findings of this research show that PECSs can effectively meet the requirements for low latency and privacy protection and are a fertile domain for further research.

Survey of research on confidential computing

AbstractAs the global data strategy deepens and data elements accelerate integrating and flowing more rapidly, the demand for data security and privacy protection has become increasingly prominent. Confidential computing emerges as a crucial security technology to solve security and privacy problem, and it is also a hot subject of in contemporary security technologies. Leveraging collaborative security in both hardware and software, it builds a trusted execution environment to ensure confidentiality and integrity protection for data in use. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the development process of confidential computing, summarizing its current research status and issues, which focuses on the security requirements for data security and privacy protection. Furthermore, it deeply analyses the common technical features of confidential computing, and proposes a trusted confidential computing architecture based on collaborative hardware and software trust. Then, it elaborates on the research status and issues of confidential computing from four aspects: hardware security, architecture and key technologies, applications, and standards and evaluation. Finally, this paper provides a synthesis and outlook for the future development of confidential computing. In summary, confidential computing is currently in a rapidly developing stage and will play an important role in cyber security in the future.

A comparative analysis: health data protection laws in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Purpose General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU) was passed to protect data privacy. Though the GDPR intended to address issues related to data privacy in the EU, it created an extra-territorial effect through Articles 3, 45 and 46. Extra-territorial effect refers to the application or the effect of local laws and regulations in another country. Lawmakers around the globe passed or intensified their efforts to pass laws to have personal data privacy covered so that they meet the adequacy requirement under Articles 45–46 of GDPR while providing comprehensive legislation locally. This study aims to analyze the Malaysian and Saudi Arabian legislation on health data privacy and their adequacy in meeting GDPR data privacy protection requirements. Design/methodology/approach The research used a systematic literature review, legal content analysis and comparative analysis to critically analyze the health data protection in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia in comparison with GDPR and to see the adequacy of health data protection that could meet the requirement of EU data transfer requirement. Findings The finding suggested that the private sector is better regulated in Malaysia than the public sector. Saudi Arabia has some general laws to cover health data privacy in both public and private sector organizations until the newly passed data protection law is implemented in 2024. The finding also suggested that the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 of Malaysia and the Personal Data Protection Law 2022 of Saudi Arabia could be considered “adequate” under GDPR. Originality/value The research would be able to identify the key principles that could identify the adequacy of the laws about health data in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia as there is a dearth of literature in this area. This will help to propose suggestions to improve the laws concerning health data protection so that various stakeholders can benefit from it.

PT-ADP: A personalized privacy-preserving federated learning scheme based on transaction mechanism

Differential privacy (DP) is a widely used technique for enhancing privacy in federated learning (FL) frameworks, whereby noise is added to the datasets or learning parameters to prevent attackers from discovering which client (i.e., the data owner) the sensitive information originated from. More noise implies higher privacy protection but also leads to a decrease in model accuracy. The privacy budget is a key parameter that controls the amount of noise. Most existing methods focus on the same privacy budget, ignoring the various privacy protection requirements of the clients. In this study, we propose PT-ADP, which is a personalized privacy-preserving federated learning scheme. First, a privacy transaction mechanism (PT) is proposed to realize personalized allocation of privacy budget for clients through “quotation-allocation.” Subsequently, an adaptive transmission data perturbation mechanism (ADP) is proposed to save a large amount of privacy budget and improve accuracy under the premise of providing sufficient privacy protection. The security, convergence, efficiency, and specific parameters of the proposed scheme were theoretically analyzed and verified through extensive experiments. PT-ADP can improve model availability while providing the same level of privacy protection compared to other schemes, without increasing complexity and communication overhead.

Multidimensional Epidemiological Survey Data Aggregation Scheme Based on Personalized Local Differential Privacy

In recent years, with the rapid development of intelligent technology, information security and privacy issues have become increasingly prominent. Epidemiological survey data (ESD) research plays a vital role in understanding the laws and trends of disease transmission. However, epidemiological investigations (EI) involve a large amount of privacy-sensitive data which, once leaked, will cause serious harm to individuals and society. Collecting EI data is also a huge task. To solve these problems and meet personalized privacy protection requirements in EIs, we improve the uOUE protocol based on utility-optimized local differential privacy to improve the efficiency and accuracy of data coding. At the same time, aiming at the collection and processing of ESD, a multidimensional epidemiological survey data aggregation scheme based on uOUE is designed. By using Paillier homomorphic encryption and an identity-based signature scheme to further prevent differential attacks and achieve multidimensional data aggregation, the safe, efficient, and accurate aggregation processing of ESD is executed. Through security proof and performance comparison, it is verified that our algorithm meets the requirements of local differential privacy and unbiased estimation. The experimental evaluation results on two data sets show that the algorithm has good practicability and accuracy in ESD collection and provides reliable and effective privacy protection.

Redundant data detection and deletion to meet privacy protection requirements in blockchain-based edge computing environment

Redundant data detection and deletion to meet privacy protection requirements in blockchain-based edge computing environment

Adaptive Personalized Randomized Response Method Based on Local Differential Privacy

Aiming at the problem of adopting the same level of privacy protection for sensitive data in the process of data collection and ignoring the difference in privacy protection requirements, the authors propose an adaptive personalized randomized response method based on local differential privacy (LDP-APRR). LDP-APRR determines the sensitive level through the user scoring strategy, introduces the concept of sensitive weights for adaptive allocation of privacy budget, and realizes the personalized privacy protection of sensitive attributes and attribute values. To verify the distorted data availability, LDP-APRR is applied to frequent items mining scenarios and compared with mining associations with secrecy konstraints (MASK), and grouping-based randomization for privacy-preserving frequent pattern mining (GR-PPFM). Results show that the LDP-APRR achieves personalized protection of sensitive attributes and attribute values with user participation, and the maxPrivacy and avgPrivacy are improved by 1.2% and 4.3%, respectively, while the availability of distorted data is guaranteed.

A security and privacy preserving approach based on social IoT and classification using DenseNet convolutional neural network

This method is able to synthesize fine-detailed images by the use of a global attention that gives more attention to the words in the textual descriptions. Also we have the deep attention multimodal similarity model (DAMSM) that calculates the matching loss in the generator. Though this work produced images of high quality, there was some loss while training the system and it takes enough time for training. Although there has been little study on applying character-level Dense Net algorithms for text classification tasks; the Dense Net structures we suggested in this paper have shown outstanding performance in image classification tasks. Extensive testing has revealed that they perform better when it comes to their ability to withstand interruption and that they can influence exerted many organizations implementing information usage and language information on the specifications of user privacy protection, framework implies, and regulatory requirements.

Channel Adaptive and Sparsity Personalized Federated Learning for Privacy Protection in Smart Healthcare Systems.

With the booming development of Smart Healthcare Systems (SHSs), employing federated learning (FL) in SHS devices has become a research hotspot. FL, as a distributed learning framework, can train models without sharing the original data among users, and then protect the user privacy. Existing research has proposed many methods to improve the security and efficiency of FL, which may not fully consider the characteristics of SHSs. Specifically, the requirements of privacy protection and efficiency pose significant challenges to FL. Current studies have struggled to balance privacy security and efficiency, and the degradation of model training efficiency in SHSs can be critical to patient health. Therefore, to improve the privacy protection of healthcare data and ensure communication efficiency, this work proposes a novel personalized FL framework based on Communication quality and Adaptive Sparsification (pFedCAS). In order to achieve privacy protection, a control unit is proposed and introduced to adjust the sparsity of the local model adaptively. To further improve the training efficiency, a selection unit is added during global model aggregation to select suitable clients for parameter updates. Finally, we validate the proposed method operated on the HAM10000 dataset. Simulation results validate that pFedCAS can not only improve privacy protection, but also gain an improvement of 15% in training accuracy and a reduction of 30% in training costs based on communication quality. The simulation results also validate the excellent robustness of pFedCAS to non-iid data.

Federated split learning for sequential data in satellite–terrestrial integrated networks

Satellite–terrestrial integrated networks (STINs) have been proposed for B5G/6G mobile communication, and the increase in the computation and communication capacities of satellites opens the door for satellite edge computing in space. The requirements of privacy protection and communication efficiency lead to the inefficiency or deficiency of traditional learning approaches in STINs. This study incorporates federated learning and split learning paradigms with STINs and introduces a split-then-federated learning framework and federated split learning with long short-term memory to handle sequential data in STINs. A case study of electricity theft detection based on a real-world sequential power load dataset is utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Numerical experiments show that the proposed FedSL-LSTM model is an effective federated learning solution and a competitive solution compared with centralized models in terms of classification performance evaluation metrics.

Federated recommender systems based on deep learning: The experimental comparisons of deep learning algorithms and federated learning aggregation strategies

Due to the requirements of privacy protection and data asset ownership, recommender systems (RSs) based on centralized training process may be infeasible in some practical situations. In these situations, federated recommender systems (FedRec) based on deep learning are regarded as the substitutes with extensive application backgrounds and enormous potential business values. However, which deep learning algorithm and federated learning aggregation strategy perform best in the training of FedRec is still an unsolved question. To answer this question, experiments are conducted for comparing the performances of four popular deep learning algorithms and three federated learning aggregation strategies in FedRec. The experiments are conducted on 8 public datasets to obtain 96 FedRec precisions (4 deep learning algorithms × 3 federated learning aggregation strategies × 8 datasets). Then, the Wilcoxon test is used to verify whether there is a significant difference between the FedRec combinations and to derive the best combination. The result shows that, in terms of recommendation precision, the best FedRec is the combination of neural FM and federated averaging. In terms of execution iterations, the best FedRec is the combination of deep crossing and attentive federated aggregation. The obtained results would be valuable for further promoting the development of RSs under the situations that a centralized training process is infeasible.

Smart services and privacy, can we have both?

Smart services’ data-intensive nature means their convenience for users comes with privacy concerns. This poses challenges for the supply of smart services. This paper analyses the impact of user-differentiated privacy costs on smart service supply strategies. It also discusses the effects of privacy protections and data utilisation capabilities on the improvement of smart service levels. We find that providers tend to segment the market based on user privacy sensitivity to capture the maximum consumer surplus. Strict privacy protection requirements may cause providers to sacrifice service quality. Privacy protection is conducive to improving the level of smart services only when users fully recognise these services’ value. Interestingly, our study finds improvements in service levels by providers are driven by two factors. On the one hand, providers choose to improve their service levels to obtain more data and create more profits. On the other hand, to reduce the opportunity costs of early investments to develop services, providers need to improve their capabilities to utilise the value of data, ultimately leading to improved service levels. This study brings a new perspective to the supply of smart services and offers suggestions for how to resolve the contradiction between smart service use and privacy preservation.

High Dimensional Data Differential Privacy Protection Publishing Method Based on Association Analysis

In order to solve the problem of privacy disclosure when publishing high-dimensional data and to protect the privacy of frequent itemsets in association rules, a high-dimensional data publishing method based on frequent itemsets of association rules (PDP Growth) is proposed. This method, in a distributed framework, utilizes rough set theory to improve the mining of association rules. It optimizes association analysis while reducing the dimensionality of high-dimensional data, eliminating more redundant attributes, and obtaining more concise frequent itemsets, and uses the exponential mechanism to protect the differential privacy of the simplest frequent itemset obtained, and effectively protects the privacy of the frequent itemset by adding Laplace noise to its support. The theory validates that the method satisfies the requirement of differential privacy protection. Experiments on multiple datasets show that this method can improve the efficiency of high-dimensional data mining and meet the privacy protection. Finally, the association analysis results that meet the requirements are published.

Research on Data Mining Technology of Internet Privacy Protection based on local differential privacy

With the rapid development of social economy and science and technology, data sharing and analysis technology is one of the contents widely used in the Internet field. Collecting and distributing terminal data and mining analysis is the normal form of big data analysis. Under the condition of mutual distrust between the collector and the terminal data owner, privacy protection in data collection and analysis will directly affect the application results of big data analysis. Nowadays, localized differential privacy has been applied in data acquisition and data mining analysis. Although there are still many problems in relevant theories and technologies, with the continuous in-depth research of scientific researchers, relevant issues have been proposed according to practical cases, which not only effectively control the privacy budget loss, but also improve the accuracy of data application. Therefore, on the basis of understanding the concept of localized differential privacy and related models, and according to the current application status of Internet privacy protection data mining technology, this paper proposes a clustering method with LDP GMMC as the core. The final experimental results show that the improved data acquisition method can better meet the privacy protection requirements in the non-spherically distributed data scenario.

Reversible Database Watermarking Based on Order-preserving Encryption for Data Sharing

In the era of big data, data sharing not only boosts the economy of the world but also brings about problems of privacy disclosure and copyright infringement. The collected data may contain users’ sensitive information; thus, privacy protection should be applied to the data prior to them being shared. Moreover, the shared data may be re-shared to third parties without the consent or awareness of the original data providers. Therefore, there is an urgent need for copyright tracking. There are few works satisfying the requirements of both privacy protection and copyright tracking. The main challenge is how to protect the shared data and realize copyright tracking while not undermining the utility of the data. In this article, we propose a novel solution of a reversible database watermarking scheme based on order-preserving encryption. First, we encrypt the data using order-preserving encryption and adjust an encryption parameter within an appropriate interval to generate a ciphertext with redundant space. Then, we leverage the redundant space to embed robust reversible watermarking. We adopt grouping and K-means to improve the embedding capacity and the robustness of the watermark. Formal theoretical analysis proves that the proposed scheme guarantees correctness and security. Results of extensive experiments show that OPEW has 100% data utility, and the robustness and efficiency of OPEW are better than existing works.

Blockchain-Based Trusted Federated Learning with Pre-Trained Models for COVID-19 Detection

COVID-19 is a serious epidemic that not only endangers human health, but also wreaks havoc on the development of society. Recently, there has been research on using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for COVID-19 detection. As AI has entered the era of big models, deep learning methods based on pre-trained models (PTMs) have become a focus of industrial applications. Federated learning (FL) enables the union of geographically isolated data, which can address the demands of big data for PTMs. However, the incompleteness of the healthcare system and the untrusted distribution of medical data make FL participants unreliable, and medical data also has strong privacy protection requirements. Our research aims to improve training efficiency and global model accuracy using PTMs for training in FL, reducing computation and communication. Meanwhile, we provide a secure aggregation rule using differential privacy and fully homomorphic encryption to achieve a privacy-preserving Byzantine robust federal learning scheme. In addition, we use blockchain to record the training process and we integrate a Byzantine fault tolerance consensus to further improve robustness. Finally, we conduct experiments on a publicly available dataset, and the experimental results show that our scheme is effective with privacy-preserving and robustness. The final trained models achieve better performance on the positive prediction and severe prediction tasks, with an accuracy of 85.00% and 85.06%, respectively. Thus, this indicates that our study is able to provide reliable results for COVID-19 detection.

LDIA: Label distribution inference attack against federated learning in edge computing

With the popularity of IoT (Internet of Things) applications, edge computing has received lots of attention. To meet data privacy protection requirements of edge nodes and cope with their unbalanced data distribution, federated learning (FL), a distributed learning framework, is widely used in intelligent edge computing applications. However, recent studies have shown that FL still suffers from privacy leakage problems, including membership inference, data reconstruction, etc. However, these studies mainly focus on the feature information of private data. In this paper, we concern the user-level label privacy in FL. We propose LDIA, a label distribution inference attack against FL in edge computing, exploring the possibility that an honest but curious cloud server can infer the proportions of samples per label in the edge user’s private data. LDIA is inspired by the observation that parameter changes in the output layer of a model can reflect the label distribution of training data. We use a neural network to learn individual features of the output layer updates over different label distributions, and then perform inference from local models uploaded by users. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that LDIA is effective on various datasets in different settings, demonstrating the severe privacy leakage in FL-based edge computing.

Technical challenges of blockchain technology for sustainable manufacturing paradigm in Industry 4.0 era using a fuzzy decision support system

Since 2008, many academics have increasingly paid attention to blockchain technology from different perspectives. In general, researchers desire to achieve global blockchain systems within a sustainable manufacturing domain; however, a number of technical challenges have come to exist in the recent decade, for instance, consensus algorithms and computing paradigms that can meet the privacy protection requirements of manufacturing systems. Therefore, an integrated decision-making framework called Pythagorean fuzzy-entropy-rank sum-Combined Compromise Solution (PF-entropy-RS-CoCoSo) is developed in this study, including two main phases. In the first phase, the PF-entropy-RS method is applied to obtain the subjective and objective weights of criteria to evaluate the technical challenges of transforming blockchain technology for a sustainable manufacturing paradigm in the Industry 4.0 era. The PF-CoCoSo model is then utilized in the second phase to assess the preferences of organizations over different technical challenges of the blockchain technology transformation for the sustainable manufacturing paradigm in the Industry 4.0 era. An empirical case study is taken to assess the main technical challenges of blockchain technology transformation for the sustainable manufacturing paradigm. Furthermore, a comparison analysis and a sensitivity investigation are made to demonstrate the superiority of the developed framework.

BPVSE: Publicly Verifiable Searchable Encryption for Cloud-Assisted Electronic Health Records

Cloud-assisted electronic health records (EHRs) provide convenient medical services for patients by storing and analyzing medical data records in the cloud, but searching for sensitive data (e.g., identity, medical history) in the cloud conflicts with privacy protection requirements. Searchable encryption (SE) is a good cryptographic primitive for solving this conflict, which allows the user to store their encrypted data in the cloud and search them later in encrypted domain. However, the direct applications of most existing SE schemes in cloud-assisted EHRs may result in challenges, for example in terms of functionality, security and efficiency. In this paper, we propose BPVSE, a new verifiable and dynamic SE scheme for cloud-assisted EHR. BPVSE has the following advantages over existing approaches. First, leveraging blockchain and hash-proof chain, BPVSE allows the user to publicly verify the search result returned by the cloud without a trusted authority. Second, BPVSE supports dynamic datasets with forward and backward security, using our newly designed new hidden data structure. Third, BPVSE enables the user to launch parallel search with efficient encryption. We formally prove the security of the proposed BPVSE, and also conduct theoretical comparison and experimental evaluation to show its superiority of functionality, security, and efficiency.

LEAF: Let’s Efficiently Make Adaptive Forwarding in Payment Channel Networks

Blockchain technology is widely applicable to modern payment systems but has inherent throughput limitations. Off-chain networks are proposed to solve scalability issues, which allows parties to efficiently perform micropayments without committing all of the payments to the blockchain. Off-chain payments with security and privacy protection requirements use the smart contract to ensure security and reduce the risk of sensitive information leakage. Although off-chain payments avoid expensive on-chain operations, it raises many concerns, such as the capacity limitation of payment channels and highly dynamic channel status, lowering the throughput of payment channel networks (PCNs). In our work, we explore the path overlap issues in PCNs and propose a decentralized payment routing scheme to improve the network throughput and reduce the redundant traffic overhead of PCNs, thereby guaranteeing efficient payments. The simulation results indicate that the proposed routing algorithm can achieve higher throughput than other routing schemes while guaranteeing short payment times.