Trust, Security and Privacy for Big Data

Mamoun Alazab, Maanak Gupta, Mamoun Alazab, Maanak Gupta

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032047522
  9781032047508
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000619133
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Engineering
• Index: Computer Science

Data has revolutionized the digital ecosystem. Readily available large datasets foster AI and machine learning automated solutions. The data generated from diverse and varied sources including IoT, social platforms, healthcare, system logs, bio-informatics, etc. contribute to and define the ethos of Big Data which is volume, velocity and variety. Data lakes formed by the amalgamation of data from these sources requires powerful, scalable and resilient storage and processing platforms to reveal the true value hidden inside this data mine. Data formats and its collection from various sources not only introduce unprecedented challenges to different domains including IoT, manufacturing, smart cars, power grids etc., but also highlight the security and privacy issues in this age of big data. Security and privacy in big data is facing many challenges, such as generative adversary networks, efficient encryption and decryption algorithms, encrypted information retrieval, attribute-based encryption, attacks on availability, and reliability. Providing security and privacy for big data storage, transmission, and processing have been attracting much attention in all big data related areas.

The book provides timely and comprehensive information for researchers and industry partners in communications and networking domains to review the latest results in security and privacy related work of Big Data. It will serve computer science and cybersecurity communities including researchers, academicians, students, and practitioners who have interest in big data trust privacy and security aspects. It is a comprehensive work on the most recent developments in security of datasets from varied sources including IoT, cyber physical domains, big data architectures, studies for trustworthy computing, and approaches for distributed systems and big data security solutions etc.

1 DigImoPriv a Big Data Framework for Preserving Privacy of Digital Immortals

Kumar Vikram and Muhammad Rizwan Asghar*

*Corresponding author: [email protected]

ABSTRACT

As digital and Internet technologies shape our daily lives, we continue to store important information on the Internet. This information, also known as digital asset, can be in the form of emails, pictures, videos, music files or online documents. Recently, researchers and technology designers have focused on building systems relating to digital assets being made available about someone following their death – known as digital legacy. Most of the work on digital legacy involves providing services, such as remembering the bereaved or providing information of the deceased to the loved ones. However, little research has gone into preserving the privacy of the deceased also known as afterlife privacy or digital immortal privacy. In this book chapter, we have presented a digital legacy framework for big data, called DigImoPriv, which is based on the principles of policy-based access control mechanisms that can enable a fine-grained access mechanism to the digital asset. These policies defined in DigImoPriv will be the basis to preserve digital immortal privacy of the digital asset owner. This work will enable future opportunities that will empower digital users to share their digital assets, preserve digital immortal privacy and ultimately be remembered as positive and happy citizens.

1. Introduction

Over the last decade, the Internet and digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way we interact, communicate, and store information. These technology tools and services, such as emails, data files, photos, videos, social network sites, and blogs are embedded in many aspects of our daily lives – at work, in our personal life, entertainment and civic behaviour. Consequently, we continue to generate and store substantial amounts of data throughout our lifetime. Recently, many researchers and technology designers have considered issues related to this information being made available about someone following their death – also known as digital legacy [1, 2]. The information that is stored as an online form becomes a digital asset [1, 2], which can be, for instance, photos, videos, music, emails, and blogs. These digital assets can originate from or be stored on: (a) online services including websites, social media, emails, and cloud services; and (b) digital devices, such as hard disks, mobile phones, and laptops [3].

School of Computer Science, The University of Auckland, New Zealand.

While researchers and technology designers for digital legacy systems have focused on providing services (e.g., remembering the bereaved to sharing information with loved ones), little research has gone into preserving the privacy of the deceased person [4, 5], a.k.a. afterlife privacy or, more recently, digital immortal privacy [6]. Currently, there are no standard laws governing digital immortal privacy. In the absence of these digital immortal privacy laws, regulation of both the privacy and the digital asset rights of the deceased will fall under the service terms of the digital intermediary platforms where the digital assets are stored, such as social networks, cloud services, blogs, and emails [4, 7]. In such a situation, it is most likely that any future disputes or disagreements on digital immortal privacy will be handled by intermediary digital platforms and the beneficiaries of the deceased, provided they have the rights granted [4, 7]. The rights of the digital platforms are usually determined by their own unilaterally dictated terms of service, and rights granted to the beneficiaries are determined by succession laws [4, 7]. In both cases, neither side of this conflict has the best interests in preserving privacy of the deceased [4, 7].

In our literature review on digital legacy systems and digital immortal privacy, there is no work on designing a framework or solutions that offer users granular access to the digital asset and preserve digital immortal privacy. Such a system would provide enhanced user experience and greater flexibility to the digital asset owner in order to share digital assets with their loved ones. While digital assets can be broad – photos, emails, music files, data files, blogs, there is some work done on email digital assets in this area by Google [8]. Google has implemented the Inactive account manager for its users to share their data (organised into folders) with nominated persons in an event there is no activity for a specific time period [8]. However, this is still coarse-grained, where entire folders will be shared and thus may not have the appropriate privacy protection for the deceased. Preserving digital immortal privacy and providing a fine-grained access control mechanism is a challenge as most digital assets are heterogeneous and have unstructured data [1, 8–11].

To address the need for enhanced user experience and greater flexibility with granular access to the digital asset and to preserve digital immortal privacy in digital legacy systems, we have designed a digital legacy framework for big data – DigImoPriv–that will provide the digital asset owner defined policies with a fine-grained access mechanism. These defined policies delivered through the access control mechanism will protect the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the digital asset against unauthorised access, thus preserving digital immortal privacy. There are two types of users defined in the digital legacy framework, the owner of the digital asset and the bereaved. The bereaved is the contact who has been given access to digital assets by the owner. The authentication and appropriate access to the folders are determined by a policy-based access control mechanism. DigImoPriv will have an intelligent data classifier to annotate the contents of the digital asset based on data labels into categories, such as private, confidential, unrestricted, or even events/sentiments, such as happy and sad moments. These components in DigImoPriv will work together with the support of a synchronous system – a timer that would periodically check the owner’s living status by checking the user’s online activity. In the event of no activity, the system will send invitations to the nominated persons or contacts to access the digital asset. The novelty of this solution is in the design of DigImoPriv, which brings the three components working together, i.e., a policy-based access control mechanism to provide the fine-grained access control, the logic required to categorise the PII contents of the digital asset that will preserve digital immortal privacy and the synchronous system to monitor the digital asset owner’s activity. In this chapter, our research problem is to find an approach to protect digital immortal privacy and provide a fine-grained access control mechanism to the digital asset, as data within the digital assets are heterogeneous and unstructured. The main contributions of this work are:

• We define use case scenarios where digital immortal privacy was important to the digital asset owner.
• We propose high-level system requirements that address the issues in digital immortal privacy and enables a fine-grained access control mechanism to the digital asset.
• We provide a thorough literature review in the areas of digital legacy systems, digital immortal privacy, PII, and access control mechanisms.
• We present DigImoPriv that addresses digital immortal privacy to the digital asset owner and enables a fine-grained access control mechanism to the digital asset.
• We instantiate DigImoPriv by considering emails as digital assets and discuss solution details.
• We present future research opportunities in digital immortal privacy and fine-grained access control in digital legacy systems.

This chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 defines four scenarios where the digital asset owner’s digital immortal privacy was violated. Following the scenarios section, we enumerate the high-level requirements. Section 3 reviews various research approaches in digital legacy systems, PII and different access control mechanisms. Section 4 presents the proposed idea, design of the digital legacy framework, define the high-level system model, different entities and the general overview. Section 5 explains the detailed design of the digital legacy framework using email digital asset as an example. Section 6 concludes this work and provides research directions for future work.

2. Scenarios and Requirements

In this section, we present scenarios where there is a need to protect and preserve the user’s reputation, dignity, integrity, secrets, or memory after their death.

2.1 Use Case Scenarios

Army Officer Died in Combat on an International Mission

A young army officer died in combat in an overseas assignment. His widow, who was the beneficiary, petitioned to have access to the army officer’s email account. However, the email service provider disagreed and refused to transfer the account passwords and its contents and decided to stand by its service agreements. Further, they argued as per their service terms, on the account of the email owner’s death, they would terminate the account and delete all the contents. The widow petitions the court, after which, the email service provider agreed to transfer the contents of the account, which she managed to download. After going through the contents, the widow found evidence of emails where her husband had a homosexual affair with a fellow serviceman adding to her grief and agony. In some of the emails, the army officer explicitly conveyed that his wife was never to know about this private information [12].

Well-Known Writer Died Leaving his Unfinished Work in the Cloud Storage

A well-known writer died after a long illness. During his illness, he conveyed to his lawyer that he did not want to publish any unfinished work after his death. The reasons for the request were that the unpublished work could of be sub-standard or might reveal secrets for which he might not yet have obtained permissions to disclose. Before his death, he destroyed all the physical manuscripts but forgot about his unfinished work on the online digital storage. Meanwhile, his only son, James, found out about the work on the online storage ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• Table of Contents
• 1. DigImoPriv a Big Data Framework for Preserving Privacy of Digital Immortals
• 2. Federated Learning Role in Big Data, Jot Services and Applications Security, Privacy and Trust in Jot A Survey
• 3. From the Cloud to the Edge Towards a Distributed and Light Weight Secure Big Data Pipelines for IoT Applications
• 4. Ground Point Filtering and Digital Terrain Model Generation using LiDAR Data
• 5. Predictive Big Data Analytics and Privacy based Decision Support System
• 6. Fingerprinting Based Positioning Techniques Using Machine Learning Algorithms Principles, Approaches and Challenges
• 7. Recent Advancements in Network and Cyber Security using RNN
• 8. A Big Data Framework for Consent
• 9. A Low-Level Hybrid Intrusion Detection System Based on Hardware Performance Counters
• 10. Comparative Study on Machine Learning Methods to Detect Metamorphic Threats
• Index