Preserving Privacy of Vulnerable Users across Heterogeneous Sensitive Sensor Data Streams using Smart Contracts

Abstract

This paper is concerned with helping people who are vulnerable during important transitions in life, such as ‘coming out’ as LGBTQIA+, experiencing serious illness, undergoing relationship breakdown etc. Rich sensor streams derived from so-called ‘smart’ Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be highly beneficial, for example in ensuring the safety of such individuals during their sensitive life transitions, or in providing functionality that can mitigate some of the difficulties faced by them. However, the data that needs to be extracted to provide these benefits can itself be highly sensitive and needs to be processed with safeguards to protect privacy. We develop scenarios that highlight issues arising from having to merge data streams from multiple devices, including data governance issues that are relevant when the sensors are owned by multiple individuals. We propose a “Transition Guardian” architecture that leverages “Smart Experts” written as smart contracts operating on homomorphically encrypted sensor data streams to provide real-time protection without disclosing their sensitive information. We have also implemented a proof-of-concept on the Ethereum protocol to validate our proposed solution.