Approach Overview
With the rapid expansion of smart cyber–physical systems and environments,
users are becoming increasingly concerned about their privacy, and asking for more
involvement in the control and protection of their data. However, users may not be
completely aware of the direct and indirect privacy risks involved with exchanging
data with data consumers to properly manage their privacy decisions.
Existing approaches of user privacy risk awareness suffer from several drawbacks,
including: (i) no consideration of user contextual knowledge and its impact
on data sensitivity, and thus on user privacy; (ii) lack of expressiveness in risk definitions
to consider various simple/complex data combinations; (iii) lack of representation
and serialization of data that are heterogeneous in terms of types, formats,
sources, and semantics, to allow for holistic (all-data-inclusive) risk reasoning; (iv)
lack of value-based reasoning; (v) lack of high-level risk detection that encompasses
risks of various types and inferences; (vi) lack of an adaptable/user-friendly risk
overview; (vii) lack of efficiency, performance-wise, to support the user in various
contexts; and (viii) lack of re-usability in different application domains.
To address the aforementioned limitations, we propose in this chapter CaSPI, a
context-aware semantic reasoning approach for dynamic privacy risk inference. This
approach relies on the use of ontologies and inference rules for contextual knowledge
representation and privacy risk definitions with high semantic expressiveness
power. The risk inferences are thus achieved by performing rule-based reasoning
over modeled context knowledge, which includes sensed data, as well as other background
data about the user and her environment, with their relationships. CaSPI is
generic and re-usable in different domains. Performance results showed that it provides
scalability and computational and storage efficiency, making it able to assist
the user in different contexts, including ephemeral ones.
Publication
Research Areas
- Privacy Engineering
- Privacy Risk
- Semantic Reasoning
- Context-aware Computing
- Internet of Things
Project Members
- Karam Bou-Chaaya
- Richard Chbeir
- Philippe Arnould
- Mahmoud Barhamgi
- Djamal Benslimane