Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: The Privacy Backplane - A Full Stack Approach to Individualized Privacy Controls Throughout the Internet-of-Things

The goal of this project is to develop technologies that put individuals in control of their privacy policies and data in a sensor-rich world, but enable applications that consume these data to operate within these constraints. In particular, this project focuses on future environments, such as retail contexts, healthcare facilities, and even public spaces, where the data collection and privacy interests of different actors clearly need to be resolved. This project will study and develop the concepts and infrastructure necessary to support enforcement of user requirements for privacy and data access within large-scale sensing environments in a secure and trusted way that ensures policy and functionality requirements are achieved. The foundation of the project will be an architecture for a “Privacy Backplane,” a trusted distributed system designed to enforce user-defined privacy policies that allow users to dictate how data collected about them are used, while simultaneously executing the elements of applications that need access to these data. This project will instill privacy protection throughout every component of a physical environment from sensors themselves, through the (wireless) network and edge, all the way to data storage and processing systems in the cloud. The project explicitly considers the efficiency implications of privacy policy enforcement for low-power Internet-of-Things devices. Finally, this project will leverage recent advances in secure hardware architectures to implement a trustworthy system efficiently. The right to privacy and control over one’s personal information is a core issue of our time and developing effective mechanisms to protect personal privacy is now a priority in many societies; it has been identified as a strategic priority by the U.S. government. As ever cheaper sensors deliver rapidly increasing surveillance capabilities, many organizations, companies, and governmental institutions are deploying advanced surveillance and monitoring environments with few constraints. At the same time, distributed physical sensor infrastructures enable important new applications that may bring individual and social benefits. However, the constant collection of personal data by largely anonymous companies and governmental entities has caused a significant amount of concern among the general populace. This project seeks to develop a path towards leveling the playing field that will allow users to exert more direct control over who may collect, access, and store data on them, as well as the ways these data are used. Additionally, the project will seek to increase the level of transparency for data collection and use. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.