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Trusted Networking

 TON_ImageAdvances in communications technologies offer new opportunities and pose new challenges to the increasingly important Digital Economy. As people spend more time online, browsing the web or using various applications and services, they leave digital traces that may expose various facets of their lives.  Information about individuals, increasingly collected in numerous ways and by various parties, includes e.g.: medical information, education and employment, finance information, data about our interests, spending habits and other on-line activities, location information etc.

Some of the information collected is used to provide personalised services, customised to individual's needs and specific context. However, in a lot of cases the amount of information collected exceeds what is required for the services. Additionally, individuals are increasingly becoming concerned about their privacy being eroded, and there are calls for stricter regulation of the information gathering. 

The Trusted Networking project addresses the fundamental challenge of satisfying the privacy needs of users while enabling innovation in personalised service delivery. We are also researching novel trust mechanisms to enable efficient and reliable evaluation of trust and consequent choice of the appropriate party for providing the service.

The NICTA Approach

We are evaluating and quantifying the loss of privacy in a broad environment that consists of people's online activities, computing devices, communications and other inputs that contribute to a personal digital fingerprint. Specific interest areas include privacy in Online Social Networks and privacy leaks in Wi-Fi communications.

We are developing algorithms that support privacy preserving computations over aggregate user data in distributed services. These include:

  • Differential privacy in continuous settings, where information exchange extends over time. 
  • Secure Multi-Party Computation, which enables distributed computations while keeping the input data confidential.
  • For the list of research publications, please visit the research team's web pages below.

 

The Features
  • Provides mechanisms for privacy preserving data aggregation and computations.
  • Resolves privacy issues by providing user control of the appropriate level of personal information released to an external party.
  • Enables personalised services based on user data while preserving the data privacy.
  • Raises the user awareness of privacy by evaluating whether the appropriate level of personal information is released when considering a combination of different services.
Who is helped?

By addressing the deficiencies of the current mechanisms, our project outcomes will enable innovation in personalised service delivery, particularly in mobile applications and services, while allowing user control of the level of their private information exposure. 


Linkages and collaborations

NICTA team collaborates with INRIA, Technion and Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (ISAE) with co-supervision of PhD students whose topics are aligned with the project. We also participate as a partner in the European Union FP7 project  SAIL.  NICTA expertise in privacy is complemented by our collaboration with IIS.

 

Research Team

Privacy Advisor:  Malcolm Crompton


Students

  • Golam Sarwar
  • Guillaume Smith
  • Mentari Djatmiko
  • Terence Chen 

 

Technical Enquires

A/Prof Roksana Boreli

Australian Technology Park Laboratory

Tel:  +61 2 9376 2186

Email: roksana.boreli@nicta.com.au