Privacy Mediators: Helping IoT Cross the Chasm
Venue
Hot Topics in Mobile Computing (Hot Mobile), ACM (2016) (to appear)
Publication Year
2016
Authors
Nigel Davies, Nina Taft, Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Sarah Clinch, Brandon Amos
BibTeX
Abstract
Unease over data privacy will retard consumer acceptance of IoT deployments. The
primary source of discomfort is a lack of user control over raw data that is
streamed directly from sensors to the cloud. This is a direct consequence of the
over-centralization of today’s cloud-based IoT hub designs. We propose a solution
that interposes a locally-controlled software component called a privacy mediator
on every raw sensor stream. Each mediator is in the same administrative domain as
the sensors whose data is being collected, and dynamically enforces the current
privacy policies of the owners of the sensors or mobile users within the domain.
This solution ne- cessitates a logical point of presence for mediators within the
admin- istrative boundaries of each organization. Such points of presence are
provided by cloudlets, which are small locally-administered data centers at the
edge of the Internet that can support code mobility. The use of cloudlet-based
mediators aligns well with natural personal and organizational boundaries of trust
and responsibility.
