Modern cyber physical systems (CPSs) has widely being used in our daily lives because of development of information and communication technologies (ICT). With the provision of CPSs, the security and privacy threats associated to these systems are also increasing. Passive attacks are being used by intruders to get access to private information of CPSs. In order to make CPSs data more secure, certain privacy preservation strategies such as encryption, and k-anonymity have been presented in the past. However, with the advances in CPSs architecture, these techniques also need certain modifications. Meanwhile, differential privacy emerged as an efficient technique to protect CPSs data privacy. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of differential privacy techniques for CPSs. In particular, we survey the application and implementation of differential privacy in four major applications of CPSs named as energy systems, transportation systems, healthcare and medical systems, and industrial Internet of things (IIoT). Furthermore, we present open issues, challenges, and future research direction for differential privacy techniques for CPSs. This survey can serve as basis for the development of modern differential privacy techniques to address various problems and data privacy scenarios of CPSs.

Differential Privacy Techniques for Cyber Physical Systems: A Survey

Concerns on location privacy frequently arise with the rapid development of GPS enabled devices and location-based applications. While spatial transformation techniques such as location perturbation or generalization have been studied extensively, most techniques rely on syntactic privacy models without rigorous privacy guarantee. Many of them only consider static scenarios or perturb the location at single timestamps without considering temporal correlations of a moving user's locations, and hence are vulnerable to various inference attacks. While differential privacy has been accepted as a standard for privacy protection, applying differential privacy in location based applications presents new challenges, as the protection needs to be enforced on the fly for a single user and needs to incorporate temporal correlations between a user's locations. In this paper, we propose a systematic solution to preserve location privacy with rigorous privacy guarantee. First, we propose a new definition, "δ-location set" based differential privacy, to account for the temporal correlations in location data. Second, we show that the well known l1-norm sensitivity fails to capture the geometric sensitivity in multidimensional space and propose a new notion, sensitivity hull, based on which the error of differential privacy is bounded. Third, to obtain the optimal utility we present a planar isotropic mechanism (PIM) for location perturbation, which is the first mechanism achieving the lower bound of differential privacy. Experiments on real-world datasets also demonstrate that PIM significantly outperforms baseline approaches in data utility.

http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/aims/pub/xiao15ccs.pdf

Protecting Locations with Differential Privacy under Temporal Correlations

Differential privacy is an essential and prevalent privacy model that has been widely explored in recent decades. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured overview of two research directions: differentially private data publishing and differentially private data analysis. We compare the diverse release mechanisms of differentially private data publishing given a variety of input data in terms of query type, the maximum number of queries, efficiency, and accuracy. We identify two basic frameworks for differentially private data analysis and list the typical algorithms used within each framework. The results are compared and discussed based on output accuracy and efficiency. Further, we propose several possible directions for future research and possible applications.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielaam/69/7970215/7911185-aam.pdf

Differentially Private Data Publishing and Analysis: A Survey

Data privacy arises as one of the most important concerns, facing the pervasive commoditization of big data statistic analysis in Internet of Things (IoT). Current solutions are incapable to thoroughly solve the privacy issues on data pricing and guarantee the utility of statistic outputs. Therefore, this paper studies the problem of trading private statistic results for IoT data, by considering three factors. Specifically, a novel framework for trading range counting results is proposed. The framework applies a sampling-based method to generate approximated counting results, which are further perturbed for privacy concerns and then released. The results are theoretically proved to achieve unbiasedness, bounded variance, and strengthened privacy guarantee under differential privacy. Moreover, a pricing approach is proposed for the traded results, which is proved to be immune against arbitrage attacks. The framework is evaluated by estimating the air pollution levels with different ranges on 2014 CityPulse Smart City datasets. The analysis and evaluation results demonstrate that our framework greatly reduces the error of range counting approximation; and the optimal perturbation approach enables that the private counting satisfies the specified approximation degree while providing strong privacy guarantee.

Trading Private Range Counting over Big IoT Data

Security and privacy challenges in smart cities

With the wide deployment of smart card automated fare collection (SCAFC) systems, public transit agencies have been benefiting from huge volume of transit data, a kind of sequential data, collected every day. Yet, improper publishing and use of transit data could jeopardize passengers' privacy. In this paper, we present our solution to transit data publication under the rigorous differential privacy model for the Societe de transport de Montreal (STM). We propose an efficient data-dependent yet differentially private transit data sanitization approach based on a hybrid-granularity prefix tree structure. Moreover, as a post-processing step, we make use of the inherent consistency constraints of a prefix tree to conduct constrained inferences, which lead to better utility. Our solution not only applies to general sequential data, but also can be seamlessly extended to trajectory data. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper to introduce a practical solution for publishing large volume of sequential data under differential privacy. We examine data utility in terms of two popular data analysis tasks conducted at the STM, namely count queries and frequent sequential pattern mining. Extensive experiments on real-life STM datasets confirm that our approach maintains high utility and is scalable to large datasets.

/pdf/differentially-private-transit-data-publication-a-case-study-4r3trw2bm5.pdf

Nériah M. Sossou

Papers

Differentially private transit data publication: a case study on the montreal transportation system