PROPOLIS: How can smart cities be trusted with our personal data?
Worldwide cities are rapidly becoming smarter by using technological advances, aiming to provide their citizens with more efficient and sustainable everyday lives. Instant information about traffic, health services, safety alerts, air pollution and community news is accessible by millions. Various devices equipped with sensors, cameras, as well as Internet of Things (IoT) are deployed across cities networks. However, an important consequence of cities digital connectivity is the vast personal data collection and processing, possibly raising individuals privacy issues. Thus, protecting citizens privacy becomes urgent and essential.
To address this critical issue, EURECOM’s professors Melek Önen and Antonio Faonio, experts in Cryptography, join forces with Professor Thorsten Strufe, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, expert in IT security. Having formed a longstanding collaboration that started at EURECOM, they are now collaborating for their project PROPOLIS (meaning in greek “For the City”), having freshly started this fall. Moreover, this consortium includes strong industrial partnerships with SAP (France) and Urban Institute (Germany). Also, the city of Antibes (France) and the city of Bad Hersfeld (Germany) are PROPOLIS sponsors. This project is aiming to provide solutions for privacy concerns and develop a comprehensive understanding of data privacy in the context of smart city analytics.
EURECOM and KIT join their complementary expertise to preserve our privacy; EURECOM with a longstanding track record of cryptographic tools and KIT with privacy preserving data analysis. PROPOLIS project has an important mission to accomplish which comes with a strong beneficial social impact. Here are the three distinct privacy preservation use cases with a direct impact to our everyday lives.
A. Traffic monitoring (use case from UI)
Traffic management is one of the hardest aspect that territories must handle. Therefore, technology is required in order to help understanding transport characteristics, such as cars distribution, speed and pedestrian circulation. To take a step further, mobile communications provided cities with enhanced means to gather more information on geolocalisation, speed, parking needs and other complex traffic patterns. However, a constant flow of citizens private data, within cities deployed networks, is being established at the same time.
PROPOLIS aims to ensure the privacy of all citizens that share their data during the use of smart cities infrastructure, preventing unauthorised parties to have access to the actual private queries. “We clearly see the application of our technologies and we can realistically assess whether the privacy is protected”, says Prof. Thorsten Strufe, KIT. “Technically speaking, there is a difficult trade-off to manage between preserving data privacy and optimise performance (handling traffic congestion with minimal latency, for example)”, adds Prof. Melek Önen, EURECOM.
B. Risk prevention in public spaces (use case from SAP)
Unfortunately, in cities there are often situations where risk prevention is absolutely essential, especially in life-threatening situations. CCTV cameras in cities are operating softwares, designed to recognise a potential threat, for example an unidentified object abandoned in the street, and alert authorities. The issue that PROPOLIS project is addressing in this scenario, is the protection of the intellectual property of this software. In other words, protecting the implemented detection algorithms within city cameras, ensuring industrial confidentiality and protecting it from adversary attacks. In this context, SAP will be providing the object detection model that is protected by cryptographic tools. “Moreover, we watermark the encrypted industrial software and therefore we are able to tell whether the stolen model is ours. On the other hand, city camera footage is showing individuals faces, therefore this data need to be encrypted, such as the content is not reviewed but only the threat in question”, mentions Prof. Önen.
“This project’s use cases are driven by real life problems. For example, Antibes city, is now steal proof, meaning that if you try to steal their data, you won’t find anything in their drive. If you even try to steal the camera, you won’t be able to retrieve anything; not the data or not even the used model itself”, explains Prof. Antonio Faonio from EURECOM.
C. Energy consumption (Use case from UI)
Smart home applications like monitoring energy and water consumption, temperature or even critical situations detection, are being increasingly used. Identifying anomalies, for example in water or electricity usage, could help efficiently detecting a leak or any damage in the network. However, the collection of this type of data reveals sensitive information on people’s privacy, like when they go to sleep, when they are absent or what TV programs they are watching etc. “Our goal within PROPOLIS project is to detect such anomalies without interfering with privacy sensitive data”, clarifies Prof. Önen.
What are the future prospects of the project PROPOLIS?
TS: “A direct collaboration with the party that would eventually use our system, could help give us feedback on what works better, fast enough and cost efficiently. The utter goal is to serve society and enable smart cities features, without interfering with individual’s rights and by complying with the GDPR policies.”
MO and AF: “We all want smart cities, right? But we also want to protect the privacy of the individuals. Cameras are recording people’s lives, while they go shopping, where they live where they walk and we certainly don’t want this information to be accessible. With PROPOLIS project, we will allow cities to implement smart cities features without interfering with privacy preservation. What would we like to achieve? Smart and trusted cities!”
PROPOLIS will set the foundation for a strong long-term collaboration between the French and German partners within the context of the EU Cybersecurity Initiative, ensuring that the European industry can develop an edge over the competition, especially with regards to trustworthy IT.
by Dora Matzakou for EURECOM
References
