A Comprehensive Approach to Privacy in the Cloud-based Internet of Things

Abstract

In the near future, the Internet of Things is expected to penetrate all aspects of the physical world, including homes and urban spaces. In order to handle the massive amount of data that becomes collectible and to offer services on top of this data, the most convincing solution is the federation of the Internet of Things and cloud computing. Yet, the wide adoption of this promising vision, especially for application areas such as pervasive health care, assisted living, and smart cities, is hindered by severe privacy concerns of the individual users. Hence, user acceptance is a critical factor to turn this vision into reality. To address this critical factor and thus realize the cloud-based Internet of Things for a variety of different application areas, we present our comprehensive approach to privacy in this envisioned setting. We allow an individual user to enforce all her privacy requirements before any sensitive data is uploaded to the cloud, enable developers of cloud services to integrate privacy functionality already into the development process of cloud services, and offer users a transparent and adaptable interface for configuring their privacy requirements.