A Path to Holistic Privacy in Stream Processing Systems

The massive streams of Internet of Things (IoT) data require a timely analysis to retain data usefulness. Stream processing systems (SPSs) enable this task, deriving knowledge from the IoT data in real-time. Such real-time analytics benefits many applications but can also be used to violate user privacy, as the IoT data collected from users or their vicinity is inherently sensitive. In this paper, we present our systematic look into privacy issues arising from the intersection of SPSs and IoT, identifying key research challenges towards achieving holistic privacy protection in SPSs and proposing the solutions.

Perils of Zero-Interaction Security in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) demands authentication systems which can provide both security and usability. Recent research utilizes the rich sensing capabilities of smart devices to build security schemes operating without human interaction, such as zero-interaction pairing (ZIP) and zero-interaction authentication (ZIA). Prior work proposed a number of ZIP and ZIA schemes and reported promising results. However, those schemes were often evaluated under conditions which do not reflect realistic IoT scenarios. In addition, drawing any comparison among the existing schemes is impossible due to the lack of a common public dataset and unavailability of scheme implementations. In this paper, we address these challenges by conducting the first large-scale comparative study of ZIP and ZIA schemes, carried out under realistic conditions. We collect and release the most comprehensive dataset in the domain to date, containing over 4250 hours of audio recordings and 1 billion sensor readings from three different scenarios, and evaluate five state-of-the-art schemes based on these data. Our study reveals that the effectiveness of the existing proposals is highly dependent on the scenario they are used in. In particular, we show that these schemes are subject to error rates between 0.6% and 52.8%.