Ahmed M. Elmisery

Ahmed M. Elmisery, Mirela Sertovic

The recent proliferation of smart home environments offers new and transformative circumstances for various domains with a commitment to enhancing the quality of life and experience. Most of these environments combine different gadgets offered by multiple stakeholders in a dynamic and decentralized manner, which in turn presents new challenges from the perspective of digital investigation. In addition, a plentiful amount of data records got generated because of the day to day interactions between these gadgets and homeowners, which poses difficulty in managing and analyzing such data. The analysts should endorse new digital investigation approaches to tackle the current limitations in traditional approaches when used in these environments. The digital evidence in such environments can be found inside the records of logfiles that store the historical events occurred inside the smart home. Threat hunting can leverage the collective nature of these gadgets to gain deeper insights into the best way for responding to new threats, which in turn can be valuable in reducing the impact of breaches. Nevertheless, this approach depends mainly on the readiness of smart homeowners to share their own personal usage logs that have been extracted from their smart home environments. However, they might disincline to employ such service due to the sensitive nature of the information logged by their personal gateways. In this paper, we presented an approach to enable smart homeowners to share their usage logs in a privacy preserving manner. A distributed threat hunting approach has been developed to permit the composition of diverse threat classes without revealing the logged records to other involved parties. Furthermore, a scenario was proposed to depict a proactive threat Intelligence sharing for the detection of potential threats in smart home environments with some experimental results.

Ahmed M. Elmisery, Dmitri Botvich

One of the concerns users have to confronted when using IPTV system is the information overload that makes it difficult for them to find a suitable content according to their personal preferences. Recommendation service is one of the most widely adopted technologies for alleviating this problem, these services intend to provide people with referrals of items they will appreciate based on their preferences. IPTV users must ensure their sensitive preferences collected by any recommendation service are properly secured. In this work, we introduce a framework for private recommender service based on Enhanced Middleware for Collaborative Privacy (EMCP). EMCP executes a two-stage concealment process that gives the user a complete control on the privacy level of his/her profile. We utilize trust mechanism to augment the accuracy and privacy of the recommendations. Trust heuristic spot users who are trustworthy with respect to the user requesting the recommendation. Later, the neighborhood formation is calculated using proximity metrics based on these trustworthy users. Finally, Users submit their profiles in an obfuscated form without revealing any information about their data, and the computation of recommendations proceeds over the obfuscated data using secure multiparty computation protocol. We expand the obfuscation scope from single obfuscation level for all users to arbitrary obfuscation levels based on trustworthy between users. In other words, we correlate the obfuscation level with different trust levels, so the more trusted a target user is the less obfuscation copy of profile he can access. We also provide an IPTV network scenario and experimentation results. Our results and analysis show that our two-stage concealment process not only protects the privacy of users but also can maintain the recommendations accuracy.

Ahmed M. Elmisery, Seungmin Rho, Dmitri Botvich

The current business model for existing recommender services is centered around the availability of users' personal data at their side whereas consumers have to trust that the recommender service providers will not use their data in a malicious way. With the increasing number of cases for privacy breaches, different countries and corporations have issued privacy laws and regulations to define the best practices for the protection of personal information. The data protection directive 95/46/EC and the privacy principles established by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are examples of such regulation frameworks. In this paper, we assert that utilizing third-party recommender services to generate accurate referrals are feasible, while preserving the privacy of the users' sensitive information which will be residing on a clear form only on his/her own device. As a result, each user who benefits from the third-party recommender service will have absolute control over what to release from his/her own preferences. We proposed a collaborative privacy middleware that executes a two stage concealment process within a distributed data collection protocol in order to attain this claim. Additionally, the proposed solution complies with one of the common privacy regulation frameworks for fair information practice in a natural and functional way -which is OECD privacy principles. The approach presented in this paper is easily integrated into the current business model as it is implemented using a middleware that runs at the end-users side and utilizes the social nature of content distribution services to implement a topological data collection protocol.