Project Overview

Providing pervasive services often necessitates gathering information about individuals that may be considered sensitive. Often, one is forced to make a difficult choice: either to risk loss of privacy or to let go of the benefits pervasive technology offers. Our conjecture is that such a choice is not always necessary. It is possible to design data collection strategies in such a way that services offered by pervasive environments do not come at the expense of individuals' privacy. This poses a number of challenges. In this project, we identify the challenges in the context of trigger-based pervasive space. One such challenge is trigger evaluation in untrusted environments, which requires techniques for trigger evaluation over encrypted data, gathered by the pervasive space. We show that these types of triggers are in fact powerful tools that can be used to capture various functionalities in pervasive spaces. Privacy is a concern in a trigger-based pervasive environment in which end-user services are built using triggers over events detected through. Using secret-sharing techniques from applied cryptography, we devised protocols to test such conditions in a way that the user data is not accessible or viewable until the time at which the condition (or set) is met. Our approach was useful in the implementation of access-control policies of the pervasive space. Our approach showed that the adversaries (i.e., people with access to the servers and logs of the pervasive space) did not know any additional information about individuals except what it deciphered from the knowledge of trigger execution. We have implemented our schemes in the context of PADoC, a framework for privacy-aware data collection that focuses on video surveillance as an example application.

People

Faculty
• Sharad Mehrotra
• Nalini Venkatasubramanian

Graduate Students
• Jehan Wickramasuriya
• Mahesh Datt
• Bijit Hore
• Parin Kenia

Undergraduate Students
• Mohanned Alhazzazi
• Jeremy Miner
• Titus Sanchez

Publications

1.  J. Wickramasuriya, M. Datt, S. Mehrotra and N. Venkatasubramanian
Privacy-Protecting Video Surveillance.
SPIE International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (Real-Time Imaging IX)
San Jose, CA, Jan. 2005
abstract • pdf

2.  J. Wickramasuriya, M. Alhazzazi, M. Datt, S. Mehrotra and N. Venkatasubramanian
Privacy-Protecting Data Collection in Media Spaces.
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM Multimedia 2004)
New York, NY, Oct. 2004
abstract • pdf

3.  Under submission.

4.  Under submission.

5.  J. Wickramasuriya, M. Datt, S. Mehrotra and N. Venkatasubramanian
An Architecture for RFID-Enabled Secure Logging in Pervasive Spaces.
Technical Report RESCUE-TR-01, CSN, University of California, Irvine
Sep. 2004

Presentations & Media

• 1. "Privacy-Preserving Pervasive Environments", 2005 • POSTER
• 2. "Privacy Protection for Pervasive Spaces" (ICS 280: Class Presentation), April 2005 • PPT
• 3. "PADoC: A Framework for Privacy-Aware Data Collection" (NSF Guest: Peter Freeman), Jan 2005 • PPT
• 3. "Privacy-Protecting Video Surveillance" (SPIE Real-Time Imaging IX), Jan 2005 • PPT
• 4. "Privacy-Protecting Data Collection in Media Spaces " (ACM Multimedia 2004), Oct 2004 • PPT
• 4. "Privacy-Protecting Data Collection in Media Spaces " (ACM Multimedia 2004: Video Demo), Oct 2004 • WMV
• 5. "Privacy Preservation for Media Spaces ", 2004 • POSTER

Software

PaDoC: A Framework for Privacy-Aware Data Collection (under construction)

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Numbers 0331707 and 0331690. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.