Data Privacy Protection Research Articles

Privacy-Preserving Process Mining: A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Aware Reversible Shared Image Approach

ABSTRACT Deeper integration of cross-organizational business process sharing and process mining has advanced the Industrial Internet. Privacy breaches and data security risks limit its use. Scrambling or anonymizing event data frequently preserves privacy in established studies. The scrambling mechanism or random noise injection corrupts event log process information and lowers process mining outcomes. This research presents a blockchain-based privacy-aware reversible shared image approach using chaotic image and privacy-aware theory for privacy-preserving process mining. Avoiding data loss, disclosure concerns, correlation attacks, and encrypted sharing is possible with the method. First, process data is turned into color images with chaotic image encryption to safeguard privacy and allow reversible reproduction. Second, the on-chain-off-chain paradigm helps handle information lightly; finally, attribute encryption of multi-view event data for correlation resistance and on-demand data encryption sharing. Simulations on common datasets reveal that: 1. The system performance of the proposed method outperforms the baseline method by 57%. 2. The strategy greatly enhances categorical and numerical data privacy. 3. It performs better in event data privacy protection and process mining fitness and precision. The proposed method ensures the secure flow of cross-organizational information in the Industrial Internet and provides a novel privacy-secure computational approach for the growing Artificial Intelligence.

Safeguarding data privacy: strategies to counteract internal and external hacking threats

In the digital age, the protection of data privacy has become increasingly important. Hackers, whether internal or external to an organization, could cause significant damage by stealing sensitive data, causing financial loss, compromising the privacy of individuals, or damaging the organization's reputation. This scientific research aimed to make substantial contributions by emphasizing the importance of addressing both internal and external hacking threats to protect sensitive information. The main theme of their work revolved around building a multi-layered defense system that included technological solutions like firewalls, encryption, and intrusion detection systems. The specific goals of their design and development approach were to establish clear policies and procedures for data handling, access control, and incident response, as well as to enhance data privacy strategies to stay ahead of evolving hacking techniques. The authors also highlighted the significance of employee awareness and training programs, collaboration with cybersecurity experts, and staying up-to-date with regulatory requirements to create a robust data privacy framework.

Safeguarding data privacy: strategies to counteract internal and external hacking threats

In the digital age, the protection of data privacy has become increasingly important. Hackers, whether internal or external to an organization, could cause significant damage by stealing sensitive data, causing financial loss, compromising the privacy of individuals, or damaging the organization's reputation. This scientific research aimed to make substantial contributions by emphasizing the importance of addressing both internal and external hacking threats to protect sensitive information. The main theme of their work revolved around building a multi-layered defense system that included technological solutions like firewalls, encryption, and intrusion detection systems. The specific goals of their design and development approach were to establish clear policies and procedures for data handling, access control, and incident response, as well as to enhance data privacy strategies to stay ahead of evolving hacking techniques. The authors also highlighted the significance of employee awareness and training programs, collaboration with cybersecurity experts, and staying up-to-date with regulatory requirements to create a robust data privacy framework.

Data privacy protection: A novel federated transfer learning scheme for bearing fault diagnosis

Research on the health diagnosis of mechanical equipment has developed unprecedentedly in recent years, and a large number of diagnostic solutions have considerably improved the stability of mechanical equipment in industrial production. However, such satisfactory diagnostic performance relies on a large number of data samples, which are frequently difficult to obtain in real industrial scenarios. The traditional strategy of data sharing is no longer advisable due to the potential conflict of interest among users. A federated transfer learning scheme is proposed to alleviate the data island problem in industrial production while protecting data privacy. This solution adopts a distributed structure, which includes local model training and global model update. A differential training scheme is proposed to enhance the domain adaptability of the local model. The central server evaluates the contribution ability of each local model to the target task. It also weights and aggregates each client model on the basis of parameter importance ranking in the form of model fusion. The target task of the experiment is performed on two sets of bearing datasets. By comparing with other diagnostic methods, a conclusion can be drawn that the proposed scheme provides a promising federated learning method while protecting client data privacy.

Blockchain for Big Data: Approaches, Opportunities and Future Directions

Abstract: The last several years have seen a significant increase in interest in big data across a range of scientific and engineering fields. Despite having several benefits and applications, big data still has some difficulties that must be overcome for a higher level of service, such as big data analytics, big data management, and big data privacy and security. Big data services and apps stand to greatly benefit from blockchain decentralisation and security features. In this article, we present an overview of blockchain for big data with an emphasis on current methods, possibilities, and upcoming trends. We begin by providing a succinct explanation of big data, blockchain, and the purpose of their integration. After that, we look at different types of blockchain assistance for big data, such as blockchain for security in big data collection, data privacy protection, storage, and collection. Next, we examine the latest work on the utilization of blockchain applications for big data across different industries, including smart grid apps and applications, smart city applications, and smart healthcare applications. A few illustrative blockchain-big data initiatives are given and discussed for a good understanding. Finally, difficulties and potential directions are examined to advance research in an exciting field.

The Formal Analysis on Negative Information Selections for Privacy Protection in Data Publishing

Negative information selection is an approach to protect the privacy by using negative information to replace original information. In this paper, we prove some bounds for negative information selection. Those bounds reveal the privacy protection strength of quantitative probability analysis. We also analyzed the reconstruction probability of original information from available negative information. The formal analysis can specify the bound on the strength of security and utility for negative information selection. Besides, we simulate brute force attacks under different data leakage ratios. Specifically, we calculate the attacker’s guess times before and after the data leakage. Experimental results indicate that the data leakage of over 30% can put the original information in a dangerous situation. Furthermore, we found that the leakage possibility has little relevance to the number of elements in the full set, but it is influenced by the ratio of the leaked information.

Secure and decentralized federated learning framework with non-IID data based on blockchain

Federated learning enables the collaborative training of machine learning models across multiple organizations, eliminating the need for sharing sensitive data. Nevertheless, in practice, the data distributions among these organizations are often non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), which poses significant challenges for traditional federated learning. To tackle this challenge, we present a hierarchical federated learning framework based on blockchain technology, which is designed to enhance the training of non-IID data., protect data privacy and security, and improve federated learning performance. The framework builds a global shared pool by constructing a blockchain system to reduce the non-IID degree of local data and improve model accuracy. In addition, we use smart contracts to distribute and collect models and design a main blockchain to store local models for federated aggregation, achieving decentralized federated learning. We train the MLP model on the MNIST dataset and the CNN model on the Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets to verify its feasibility and effectiveness. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the accuracy of decentralized federated learning on three tasks with non-IID data.

The fight for our personal data: analyzing the economics of data and privacy on digital platforms

Purpose Personal data is a powerful tool. The more someone know about us, the more power they got over us. But who will control the most of our personal data? Does the government and the big tech really care about our personal data? This paper aims to look at data practices, data-related policy making as well as its economic consequences in the context of emerging economies. Design/methodology/approach Using qualitative methods such as literature review and analysis of numerous government documents, this paper inquires into the dynamics in the use of data by the business sectors, explains how data governance can add value to the business sectors while ensuring customers’ data privacy protection based on the data governance mechanism framework and details what it takes. Findings Using the case of Indonesian recent development on data privacy regulation, this paper describes the problems and threats to personal data protection. The advent of latest computing and mobile technology is shifting power relations between the governments, the big tech, as well as the end users. To conclude, the strategy and policy recommendations for implementing data privacy protection are also presented. Originality/value This paper provides a timely synthesis of data practices in the context of developing countries, particularly in relation to policy making and economic consequences. This paper also identifies and shares several promising future research ideas.

A multi-objective approach for communication reduction in federated learning under devices heterogeneity constraints

Federated learning is a paradigm that proposes protecting data privacy by sharing local models instead of raw data during each iteration of model training. However, these models can be large, with many parameters, provoking a substantial communication cost and having a notable environmental impact. Reducing communication overhead is paramount but conflictual to maintaining the model’s accuracy. Most research has dealt with the different factors influencing communication reduction separately without addressing their correlations. Moreover, most of them do not consider the heterogeneity of clients’ hardware. Finding the optimal configuration to fulfil all these training aspects can become intractable for classical techniques. This work explores the add-in that multi-objective evolutionary algorithms can provide for solving the communication overhead problem while achieving high accuracy. We do this by 1) realistically modelling and formulating this task as a multi-objective problem by considering the devices’ heterogeneity, 2) including all the communication-triggering aspects, and 3) applying a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm with an intensification operator to solve the problem. A simulated client–server architecture of four devices with four different processing speeds is studied. Both fully connected and convolutional neural network models are investigated with 33,400 and 887,530 weights, respectively. The experiments are performed using the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. A comparison is made between three approaches using an extensive set of metrics. Results prove that our approach obtains solutions with better accuracy than the full-communication setting and other methods while getting reductions in communications by around 1,000 times in most cases and up to 10,000 times in some cases compared to the maximum communication setting.

A Dynamic Adaptive and Resource-Allocated Selection Method Based on TOPSIS and VIKOR in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized and privacy-preserving machine learning technique that protects data privacy by learning models locally and not sharing datasets. However, due to limited computing resources on devices and highly heterogeneous data in practical situations, the training efficiency and resource utilization of federated learning is low. In order to resolve these challenges, we introduce a blockchain-assisted dynamic adaptive and personalized federated learning framework (TV-FedAvg) in the presence of restricted computing power resources and data heterogeneity. After each round of local training, we utilize an improved scoring model based on VIKOR and TOPSIS to comprehensively score the devices. The scores are then utilized to choose devices for participation in global aggregation and to carry out model aggregation through blockchain consensus. Furthermore, resources are reallocated for the next round to enhance resource efficiency, model fairness, and performance. Finally, we demonstrate through experimentation that TV-FedAvg outperforms other models such as pFedMe, FedAvg, Per-FedAvg, and TOPSIS in terms of both efficiency and performance.

Data privacy protection model based on blockchain in mobile edge computing

AbstractMobile edge computing (MEC) technology is widely used for real‐time and bandwidth‐intensive services, but its underlying heterogeneous architecture may lead to a variety of security and privacy issues. Blockchain provides novel solutions for data security and privacy protection in MEC. However, the scalability of traditional blockchain is difficult to meet the requirements of real‐time data processing, and the consensus mechanism is not suitable for resource‐constrained devices. Moreover, the access control of MEC data needs to be further improved. Given the above problems, a data privacy protection model based on sharding blockchain and access control is designed in this paper. First, a privacy‐preserving platform based on a sharding blockchain is designed. Reputation calculation and improved Proof‐of‐Work (PoW) consensus mechanism are proposed to accommodate resource‐constrained edge devices. The incentive mechanism with rewards and punishments is designed to constrain node behavior. A reward allocation algorithm is proposed to encourage nodes to actively contribute to obtaining more rewards. Second, an access control strategy using ciphertext policy attribute‐based encryption (CP‐ABE) and RSA is designed. A smart contract is deployed to implement the automatic access control function. The InterPlanetary File System is introduced to alleviate the blockchain storage burden. Finally, we analyze the security of the proposed privacy protection model and statistics of the GAS consumed by the access control policy. The experimental results show that the proposed data privacy protection model achieves fine‐grained control of access rights, and has higher throughput and security than traditional blockchain.

Privacy-preserving and verifiable data aggregation for Internet of Vehicles

With the development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV), organizations or institutions are increasingly interested in aggregating vehicle perception data to perform data analysis. Nevertheless, the existing solutions are difficult to meet the comprehensive requirements of IoV scenario, such as low latency, privacy preservation and rich functions. Additionally, it is more challenging that the aggregation node may return tampered or forged aggregation results for vulnerabilities or ulterior motives. To this end, we propose a Privacy-Preserving and Verifiable Data Aggregation Scheme for IoV (PPVDA), which allows the efficient aggregation for inner product over multi-dimensional data, and the data requester can verify the correctness and integrity of the aggregation results. By exploiting homomorphic MAC and secret sharing techniques, we construct a lightweight and verifiable mechanism for results as well as data privacy protection. We also conduct a comprehensive security analysis of PPVDA under the malicious security model. Moreover, extensive theoretical analyses and experimental evaluations demonstrate that PPVDA performs efficiently while retaining more desired properties. When dealing with 4×104 VNs, 3000 RSUs and 500-dimensional vectors, each EN side only takes about 74.5 ms and the DR side only takes about 3.8 ms, is therefore suitable for practical IoV scenarios.

EFTA: An Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Data Aggregation Scheme without TTP in Smart Grid

Abstract With the rapid construction and implementation of smart grid, lots of studies have been conducted to explore how to ensure the security of information privacy. At present, most privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes in smart grid achieve privacy data protection through homomorphically encrypted data aggregation. However, these data aggregation schemes tend to rely on a trusted third party (TTP), and fail to efficiently handle the case of a meter failure. Besides, they are less flexible for overall user management, and resistance to collusion attacks needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust privacy-preserving data aggregation scheme without TTP, called EFTA. Overall, the scheme eliminates the reliance on a TTP, combines with Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme to increase overall fault tolerance, supports flexible and dynamic user management, and effectively defends against entity initiated collusion attacks. According to security and performance analysis results, the scheme proposed in this paper meets the multiple security requirements of smart grid, and is more efficient in terms of overall overhead compared to the existing privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes.

Asynchronous Federated Learning: Methods and applications

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed alternative to traditional machine learning frameworks that computes a global model on a centralized aggregation server according to the parameters of local models, which can address the privacy leakage problem caused by collecting sensitive data from local devices. However, the classic FL methods with synchronous aggregation strategies, in many cases, shall suffer from limitations in resource utilization due to the need to wait for slower devices (stragglers) to aggregate during each training epoch. In addition, the accuracy of the global model can be affected by the uneven distribution of data among unreliable devices in real-world scenarios. Therefore, many Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL) methods have been developed on many occasions to improve communication efficiency, model performance, privacy, and security. This article elaborates on the existing research on AFL and its applications in many areas. The paper first introduces the concept and development of FL, and then discusses in detail the related work and main research directions of AFL, including dealing with stragglers, staleness, communication efficiency between devices, and privacy and scalability issues. Then, this paper also explores the application of AFL in different fields, especially in the fields of mobile device edge computing, Internet of Things devices, and medical data analysis. Finally, the article gives some outlook on future research directions and believes that it is necessary to design efficient asynchronous optimization algorithms, reduce communication overhead and computing resource usage, and explore new data privacy protection methods.

A low- dose CT reconstruction algorithm across different scanners based on federated feature learning

To propose a low-dose CT reconstruction algorithm across different scanners based on federated feature learning (FedCT) to improve the generalization of deep learning models for multiple CT scanners and protect data privacy. In the proposed FedCT framework, each client is assigned an inverse Radon transform-based reconstruction model to serve as a local network model that participates in federated learning. A projection- domain specific learning strategy is adopted to preserve the geometry specificity in the local projection domain. Federated feature learning is introduced in the model, which utilizes conditional parameters to mark the local data and feed the conditional parameters into the network for encoding to enhance the generalization of the model in the image domain. In the cross-client, multi-scanner, and multi-protocol low-dose CT reconstruction experiments, FedCT achieved the highest PSNR (+2.8048, +2.7301, and +2.7263 compared to the second best federated learning method), the highest SSIM (+0.0009, +0.0165, and +0.0131 in the same comparison), and the lowest RMSE (- 0.6687, - 1.5956, and - 0.9962). In the ablation experiment, compared with the general federated learning strategy, the model with projection-specific learning strategy showed an average improvement by 1.18 on Q1 of the PSNR and an average decrease by 1.36 on Q3 of the RMSE on the test set. The introduction of federated feature learning in FedCT further improved the Q1 of the PSNR on the test set by 3.56 and reduced the Q3 of the RMSE by 1.80. FedCT provides an effective solution for collaborative construction of CT reconstruction models, which can enhance model generalization and further improve the reconstruction performance on global data while protecting data privacy.

International trade privacy data management system combining Internet of Things blockchain

Currently, international trade (Int’l Trade) often faces risks such as privacy data leakage and transaction security during transactions, which seriously affect the protection of privacy data in trade. Therefore, this article used the Internet of Things and blockchain to attempt to address these risk issues and improve the security of privacy data. By analyzing the security threats in Int’l Trade transactions, this article used additive aggregation functions to analyze the protection effect of privacy data and studied the core issues of Int’l Trade privacy data. This article analyzed the privacy protection model using the Internet of Things blockchain and proposed corresponding Int’l Trade privacy data protection strategies. Among the five surveyed enterprises, data audit and data backup were all above the standard value, while data query only exceeded the standard value for enterprises 2, 3, 4, and 5. The average abnormal value of the enterprise in data anomalies decreased by 0.06 compared to the standard value. Through experimental testing, it has been found that Internet of Things blockchain can effectively improve the privacy data protection effect of Int’l Trade and promote the convenience of Int’l Trade transactions.

Overview of big data information privacy protection technology and challenges

With the rapid development of advanced technologies like the mobile internet, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, the era of big data is gradually upon us. In this era, big data has been widely utilized in various fields like business, finance, social networking, and healthcare, and the value of data has become increasingly prominent. Data has become a new factor of production, the digital economy has become a new engine of development, and an important driving force for promoting social progress and economic development. However, with the advancement of big data technology, the risks of data leakage and misuse have increased. Personal data information leakage or misuse can lead to personal privacy infringement and fraud, such as the Sina Weibo data leak in March 2020 where attackers breached part of the Sina Weibo database, obtaining sensitive data including real names, website usernames, genders, locations, and phone numbers, impacting 538 million Weibo users. Therefore, there is an increasing demand for data information privacy protection. This paper will explore the core technologies and application scenarios in data information privacy protection and investigate data privacy protection in real-life settings.

Network traffic classification based on federated semi-supervised learning

Traffic Classification (TC) has been applied to a wide range of applications, from security monitoring to quality of service (QoS) provisioning in network Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In recent years, many researchers have applied Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL) to TC, namely AI-TC. However, AI-TC methods face significant challenges, including high data dependency, exhaustively costly traffic labeling, and network subscribers’ privacy. This paper proposes a TC framework for smart home networks using Federated Learning (FL) that protects traffic data privacy by performing local training and inference of TC models. Firstly, we design a DPI-based traffic labeling method on edge home gateways as FL nodes, which enables these nodes to have data labeling capability while protecting data privacy. Then, a semi-supervised TC model based on an autoencoder (AE) is proposed to reduce the dependence of the model on labeled traffic samples. Finally, an XAI-based method is utilized to interpret the model to ensure its explainability. We validate the proposed method on public and real datasets using benchmarking methods. The experimental results show that the method can achieve high performance using a small number of samples while protecting data privacy and improving the model’s credibility. Experimental code can be found in the following url: https://github.com/PrinceXuan12138/HGW-TC-Experimental-code.

Design of cloud data storage security and financial risk control management early warning system based on sensor networks

The wide application of sensor networks has brought great challenges to cloud data storage, such as transmission security, data privacy protection and financial risk control. In order to deal with these challenges, the system establishes a comprehensive management early warning system to ensure the data security and financial risk control of the sensor network. The system integrates sensor network technology and cloud data storage technology, and stores data in the cloud through the collection and transmission of environmental data by sensor nodes. In order to ensure the security of the stored process, the system adopts a series of security mechanisms, such as data encryption, access control and identity authentication, and also introduces the financial risk control module, which helps users to warn and manage financial risks through real-time monitoring and analysis of data in the sensor network. The system provides a user-friendly management interface, allowing users to easily configure and monitor the operating state of the sensor network, and supports flexible expansion and customization to adapt to the needs of different scenarios. Through the application of this system, users can effectively manage and control the security and financial risks of sensor networks in cloud data storage, and improve the efficiency and reliability of data storage management.

Data Privacy Protection in Islamic Communication Perspective

Technology development brings many conveniences, but on the other hand, it also provides challenges, such as data security. The phenomenon of hacking personal data that ends in fraud and other crimes seems to be evidence. Technology in the era of society 5.0 was rising to facilitate human work, but it is used to misuse big data from the individual level. Social media provides opportunities for open privacy by revealing confidential personal data. In addition to requiring self-control, it also requires security and data protection. This research aims to analyze the phenomenon of data theft in the context of Islamic communication with solutions obtained from the perspective of the Qur'an. The method utilized is qualitative research through literature study using a constructivist paradigm. The results of this study revealed that internal and external factors caused data theft. The ability to filter information and information literacy in the digital space, maintain ethics in the media space, integrate roles between government and society, and protect digital communication from the perspective of the Qur'an have a positive effect on information preservation in the digital realm. In addition, continuous integration between the government and the community is also needed to overcome the rife data theft problem.