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When transferring sensitive data to a non-trusted party, end-users require that the data be kept private. Mobile and IoT application developers want to leverage the sensitive data to provide better user experience and intelligent services. Unfortunately, existing programming abstractions make it impossible to reconcile these two seemingly conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present a novel programming mechanism for distributed managed execution environments that hides sensitive user data, while enabling developers to build powerful and intelligent applications, driven by the properties of the sensitive data. Specifically, the sensitive data is never revealed to clients, being protected by the runtime system. Our abstractions provide declarative and configurable data query interfaces, enforced by a lightweight distributed runtime system. Developers define when and how clients can query the sensitive data’s properties (i.e., how long the data remains accessible, how many times its properties can be queried, which data query methods apply, etc.). Based on our evaluation, we argue that integrating our novel mechanism with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) can address some of the most pertinent privacy problems of IoT and mobile applications.
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RemedioT: Remedial Actions for Internet-of-Things Conflicts
The increasing complexity and ubiquity of using IoT devices exacerbate the existing programming challenges in smart environments such as smart homes, smart buildings, and smart cities. Recent works have focused on detecting conflicts for the safety and utility of IoT applications, but they usually do not emphasize any means for conflict resolution other than just reporting the conflict to the application user and blocking the conflicting behavior. We propose RemedIoT, a remedial action 1 framework for resolving Internet-of-Things conflicts. The RemedIoT framework uses state of the art techniques to detect if a conflict exists in a given set of distributed IoT applications with respect to a set of policies, i.e., rules that define the allowable and restricted state-space transitions of devices. For each identified conflict, RemedIoT will suggest a set of remedial actions to the user by leveraging RemedIoT's programming abstractions. These programming abstractions enable different realizations of an IoT module while safely providing the same level of utility, e.g., if an air-conditioner application that is used to implement a cooling module conflicts with a CO2 monitor application that requires ventilation at home, a non-conflicting smart fan application will be suggested to the user. We evaluate RemedIoT on Samsung SmartThings applications and IFTTT applets and show that for 102 detected conflicts across 74 sample applications with 11 policies, RemedIoT is able to remediate ~ 80% of the conflicts found in the environment, which would normally be blocked by prior solutions. We further demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of our approach for smart city environments.
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- PAR ID:
- 10185955
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- BuildSys '19: Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportatio
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 101 to 110
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3360322.3360837
