As we move into a new decade, the global world of Intelligent Infrastructure (II) services integrated into the Internet of Things (IoT) are at the forefront of technological advancements. With billions of connected devices spanning continents through interconnected networks, security and privacy protection techniques for the emerging II services become a paramount concern. In this paper, an up-to-date privacy method mapping and relevant use cases are surveyed for II services. Particularly, we emphasize on post-quantum cryptography techniques that may (or must when quantum computers become a reality) be used in the future through concrete products, pilots, and projects. The topics presented in this paper are of utmost importance as (1) several recent regulations such as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have given privacy a significant place in digital society, and (2) the increase of IoT/II applications and digital services with growing data collection capabilities are introducing new threats and risks on citizens' privacy. This in-depth survey begins with an overview of security and privacy threats in IoT/IIs. Next, we summarize some selected Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) suitable for privacy-concerned II services, and then map recent PET schemes based on post-quantum cryptographic primitives which are capable of withstanding quantum computing attacks. This paper also overviews how PETs can be deployed in practical use cases in the scope of IoT/IIs, and maps some current projects, pilots, and products that deal with PETs. A practical case study on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is presented to demonstrate how PETs can be applied in reality. Finally, we discuss the main challenges with respect to current PETs and highlight some future directions for developing their post-quantum counterparts.
9 May 2025 in Blockchain: Research and Applications
For better data availability and accessibility while ensuring data secrecy, end-users often tend to outsource their data to the cloud servers in an encrypted form. However, this brings a major challenge to perform the search for some keywords over encrypted content without disclosing any information to unintended entities. This paper proposes a novel expressive authorized keyword search scheme relying on the concept of ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. The originality of the proposed scheme is multifold. First, it supports the generic and convenient multi-owner and multi-user scenario, where the encrypted data are outsourced by several data owners and searchable by multiple users. Second, the formal security analysis proves that the proposed scheme is semantically secure against chosen keyword and outsider's keyword guessing attacks. Third, an interactive protocol is introduced which avoids the need of any secure channels between users and service provider. Fourth, due to the concept of bilinear-map accumulator, the system can efficiently revoke users and/or their attributes, and authenticate them prior to launching any expensive search operations. Fifth, conjunctive keyword search is provided thus enabling to search for multiple keywords simultaneously, with minimal cost. Sixth, the performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms closely-related works.
International audienceSeveral existing access control solutions mainly focus on preserving confidentiality of stored data from unauthorized access and the storage provider. Moreover, to keep sensitive user data confidential against untrusted servers, existing solutions usually apply cryptographic methods by disclosing data decryption keys only to authorized users. However, these solutions inevitably introduce a heavy computation overhead on the data owner for key distribution and data management when fine-grained data access control is desired. In addition, access control policies as well as users' access patterns are also considered as sensitive information that should be protected from the cloud. In this paper, we propose PAbAC, a novel privacy preserving Attribute-based framework, that combines attribute-based encryption and attribute-based signature mechanisms for securely sharing outsourced data via the public cloud. Our proposal is multifold. First, it ensures fine-grained cryptographic access control enforced at the data owner's side, while providing the desired expressiveness of the access control policies. Second, PAbAC preserves users' privacy, while hiding any identifying information used to satisfy the access control. Third, PAbAC is proven to be highly scalable and efficient for sharing outsourced data in remote servers, at both the client and the cloud provider sid
To prove that a dataset is sufficiently anonymized, many privacy policies suggest that a re-identification risk assessment be performed, but do not provide a precise methodology for doing so, leaving the industry alone with the problem. This paper proposes a practical and ready-to-use methodology for re-identification risk assessment, the originality of which is manifold: (1) it is the first to follow well-known risk analysis methods (e.g. EBIOS) that have been used in the cybersecurity field for years, which consider not only the ability to perform an attack, but also the severity such an attack can have on an individual; (2) it is the first to qualify attributes and values of attributes with e.g. degree of exposure, as known real-world attacks mainly target certain types of attributes and not others; (3) it is the first to provide clear, comprehensible criteria and interpretable, explainable assessment results. In addition, the fine granularity of the methodology makes it possible to score the risk as accurately as possible, and thus maintain good data quality at an acceptable risk, which is very promising for the AI industrial sector. Finally, the implementation of the methodology is illustrated using the publicly available Adult dataset, which was assessed as having a critical risk of re-identification, with 14 concrete cases of individualization.