Privacy in Internet of Things: A Model and Protection Framework

A new form of computation is being evolved to include massive number of diverse set of conventional computing systems, sensors, devices, equipments, software and information services and apps. This new form of computing environment is known as the “Internet-of-Things” (IoT). The adoption of IoT is fast and the “things” are becoming integral part of people day-to-day life as well as essential elements in the businesses everyday activities and processes. Open characteristics of IoT environments raises privacy concern as “things” are autonomous with some degree of authority to sharing their capabilities and knowledge to fulfil their individual or collective tasks. As such privacy becomes central and an inherit computational aspect of the “things”. The work presented here is based on modelling IoT as Cooperative Distributed Systems (CDS). It proposes a novel approach of analysing and modelling privacy concepts and concerns. Privacy protection is captured as a form of “sensitive information” management at the interaction level. A privacy protection management framework for CDS at the interaction level is proposed. The application of the framework has been demonstrated by extending Contract Net Protocol (CNP) to support privacy protection for CDS.