Privacy Metrics
Privacy metrics are used to show how effective new privacy-enhancing technologies are, i.e. to what extent they are able to protect privacy, by measuring the amount of privacy the technologies provide. Even though many privacy metrics have been proposed, there are many studies showing their shortcomings in terms of consistency, reproducibility, and applicability in different application domains. This is an important issue because use of a weak privacy metric can lead to real-world privacy violations if the privacy metric overestimates the amount of privacy provided by a technology.
This project investigates privacy metrics for several application domains, including genomics, vehicular networks, smart metering, social network, and data publishing.
This project is supported by EPSRC (grant EP/P006752/1, "PryMe, a Universal Framework to Measure the Strength of Privacy-enhancing Technologies", 2016-2018). Key findings from this project include:
- Monotonicity, evenness, extent, and shared value range are key criteria to evaluate the strength of privacy metrics (Zhao and Wagner, TMC, 2019).
- No single metric dominates across all criteria for vehicular privacy (Zhao and Wagner, TMC, 2019).
- Many privacy metrics for graph privacy are not monotonic, i.e. they do not indicate decreasing privacy with increasing adversary strength (Zhao and Wagner, TDSC, 2020).
- When privacy metrics are combined into metrics suites using methods from decision support, the monotonicity of privacy measurement increases (Zhao and Wagner, TDSC, 2020).
- Privacy professionals’ views on data protection impact assessments show gaps in quantification of and communication about privacy risks (Ferra et al., 2020).
- The monotonicity of privacy metrics suites can be improved using evolutionary optimization (Wagner and Yevseyeva, TOPS, 2021).
The project sparked a very successful series of workshops with privacy professionals (including data protection officers, privacy consultants, and privacy activists). The first workshop (January 2018) was held during the project's runtime. The following workshops (June 2019 and November 2019) were possible through support from De Montfort University. Each workshop was attended by approx. 20 participants. According to participants, the workshop series provides a valuable platform for exchange with other privacy professionals and academics that informs and enhances their professional practice.
Selected publications:
- Isabel Wagner and Iryna Yevseyeva, "Designing Strong Privacy Metrics Suites Using Evolutionary Optimization," ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, vol. 24 (2), pp. Article 12 (February 2021), 35 pages, 2021. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Yuchen Zhao and Isabel Wagner, "Using Metrics Suites to Improve the Measurement of Privacy in Graphs," IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2020. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Fenia Ferra, Isabel Wagner, Eerke Boiten, Lee Hadlington, Ismini Psychoula and Richard Snape, "Challenges in Assessing Privacy Impact: Tales from the Front Lines," Security and Privacy, vol. 3 (2), pp. e101, 2020. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Yuchen Zhao and Isabel Wagner, "On the Strength of Privacy Metrics for Vehicular Communication," IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 18 (2), pp. 390-403, February 2019. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Wagner and David Eckhoff, "Technical Privacy Metrics: A Systematic Survey," ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 51 (3), pp. 57:1-57:38, June 2018. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Yuchen Zhao and Isabel Wagner, "POSTER: Evaluating Privacy Metrics for Graph Anonymization and De-Anonymization," Proceedings of ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS'18), Incheon, Republic of Korea, June 2018, pp. 817-819. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Wagner, "Measuring Privacy in Vehicular Networks," Proceedings of 42nd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), Singapore, October 2017, pp. 183-186. [DOI, BibTeX, Details...]
- Isabel Wagner, "Evaluating the Strength of Genomic Privacy Metrics," ACM Trans. Priv. Secur., vol. 20 (1), pp. 2:1-2:34, January 2017. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- I. Wagner, "Genomic Privacy Metrics: A Systematic Comparison," Proceedings of 2015 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), May 2015, pp. 50-59. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- I. Wagner and D. Eckhoff, "Privacy Assessment in Vehicular Networks Using Simulation," Proceedings of Simulation Conference (WSC), 2014 Winter, Savannah, GA, USA, December 2014, pp. 3155-3166. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
Managing the Privacy Risk in Smart Cities
This project address the problem of privacy risk in complex and interconnected smart city systems. With a growing number of cyber-physical systems, it becomes more and more challenging to keep track where sensitive data is collected, how it is transmitted, processed, stored and who has access to it. To alleviate this problem and improve privacy protection in smart cities, we aim to introduce a method that allows the creation, editing, exchange, and automatic analysis of privacy blueprints through a standardized modelling language.
This project is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore (grant NRF2019-ITS005-0015, 2019-2021).
Privacy in Smart Cities
Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this Orwellian future, this project investigates privacy protections for the smart city.
Selected publications:
- David Eckhoff and Isabel Wagner, "Privacy in the Smart City -- Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions," IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 20 (1), pp. 489-516, 2018. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- David Eckhoff and Isabel Wagner, "Understanding and Solving the Privacy Challenges in the Smart City," Tutorial, IEEE 2nd International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2016), Trento, Italy, 2016. [BibTeX, Details...]
Gender in Computer Science
I have studied whether a performance gap exists in addition to the gender gap in computer science. My statistical analysis of 129 UK universities between 2002 to 2013 showed that male students were awarded first-class degrees at a significantly higher rate than female students. My review of explanations and solutions for this performance gap showed that many solutions can be implemented relatively easily. For example, because visual priming has been shown to reduce automatic prejudice, I have designed a series of 29 posters of inspiring computer scientists (two-thirds female, one-third ethnic minorities, one-quarter LGBT) that are now displayed prominently in the corridors at De Montfort University.
Selected publications:
- Isabel Wagner, "Gender and Performance in Computer Science," ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), vol. 16 (3), pp. Article No. 11, May 2016. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Poster series "Inspiring Computer Scientists" - available in full resolution under Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA 4.0!
Lifetime of wireless sensor networks (concluded)
Network lifetime is a key characteristic for evaluating wireless sensor networks in an application-specific way. This project studied how the lifetime of a wireless sensor network can be measured and proposed a generic definition of sensor network lifetime for use in analytic evaluations as well as in simulation models, focusing on a formal and concise definition of accumulated network lifetime and total network lifetime.
Selected publications:
- Isabel Dietrich and Falko Dressler, "On the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks," ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, vol. 5 (1), pp. 1-39, February 2009. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Feng Chen, Isabel Dietrich, Reinhard German and Falko Dressler, "An Energy Model for Simulation Studies of Wireless Sensor Networks Using OMNeT++," Praxis der Informationsverarbeitung und Kommunikation (PIK), vol. 32 (2), pp. 133-138, June 2009. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Falko Dressler and Isabel Dietrich, "Lifetime Analysis in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks," Proceedings of 9th EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design - Architectures, Methods and Tools (DSD 2006), Dubrovnik, Croatia, August 2006, pp. 606-613. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Dietrich, Feng Chen, Reinhard German and Falko Dressler, "Modeling Energy Consumption of Wireless Communications in OMNeT++," Proceedings of GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch Systemsoftware Und Energiebewusste Systeme, Karlsruhe, Germany, October 2007, pp. 39-42. [BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
Syntony: A Framework for UML-Based Simulation, Analysis, and Test (concluded)
Model-based development provides means for efficient and platform independent software engineering. Especially UML2 is becoming a de-facto standard in this domain. To enable an early performance evaluation of systems modeled with UML, we envision the usage of UML models instead of regular simulation models to conduct discrete-event simulations. This facilitates the integration of simulation into model-based development processes, leading to a faster and more efficient system design process.
We developed the framework Syntony to support discrete-event simulation based on standard-compliant UML models. According to the principle of communicating automata, system models may consist of composite structure, state machine, and activity diagrams. Furthermore, the MARTE profile allows to specify performance attributes and measures. Syntony automatically transforms UML models to executable code for the simulation engine OMNeT++. Integrated into the Eclipse framework, Syntony supports various simulation techniques for simulation control, design of experiments, and result analysis.
The project was a collaboration with Fraunhofer IIS and funded by the BMBF Aletheia project.
Selected publications:
- Isabel Dietrich, Syntony: A Framework for UML-Based Simulation, Analysis, and Test with Applications in Wireless Networks, München, Verlag Dr. Hut, 2010. [BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Dietrich, Reinhard German, Harald Koestler and Ulrich Ruede, "Modeling Multigrid Algorithms for Variational Imaging," Proceedings of 21st Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2010), Auckland, New Zealand, April 2010, pp. 224-234. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Dietrich, Falko Dressler, Winfried Dulz and Reinhard German, "Validating UML Simulation Models with Model-Level Unit Tests," Proceedings of 3rd ACM/ICST International Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques for Communications, Networks and Systems (SIMUTools 2010), Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain, March 2010. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Dietrich, Falko Dressler and Reinhard German, "Syntony: A Framework For Model-Driven Simulation, Analysis, And Test," Proceedings of Winter Simulation Conference (WSC 2009), Doctoral Colloquium, Austin, TX, December 2009. [BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Christoph Sommer, Isabel Dietrich, Falko Dressler, Winfried Dulz and Reinhard German, "A Tool Chain for UML-Based Modeling and Simulation of VANET Scenarios with Realistic Mobility Models," Proceedings of 9th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc 2008), Demo Session, Hong Kong, China, May 2008. [BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Dietrich, Volker Schmitt, Falko Dressler and Reinhard German, "SYNTONY: Network Protocol Simulation Based on Standard-Conform UML 2 Models," Proceedings of 2nd ACM/ICST International Conference on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools (ValueTools 2007): 1st ACM/ICST International Workshop on Network Simulation Tools (NSTools 2007), Nantes, France, October 2007. [DOI, BibTeX, PDF and Details...]
- Isabel Dietrich, Volker Schmitt, Falko Dressler and Reinhard German, "UML-Based Simulation of AODV with SYNTONY," Proceedings of 4th International Conference on the Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST), Graduate Symposium, Edinburgh, Scotland, September 2007. [BibTeX, Details...]