Speaker: Bryan Hall, ECpE Graduate Student
Advisor: Manimaran Govindarasu
Title: An Assured Deletion Technique for the Cloud-based Internet of Things
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud are expanding technologies with many security vulnerabilities. With at least one major data leak every year since 2004, the public’s concern for data privacy has given rise to legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act in the United States. Assured deletion, the process by which outsource data on the cloud is made permanently unrecoverable, is a strong defense against data leaks. The existing assured deletion solutions fall into two categories: cryptographic protection and secure overwriting. Cryptographic protection blocks malicious data preservation but leaves data subject to cryptanalysis. Secure overwriting prevent cryptanalysis attacks but leaves data subject to malicious data preservation. Furthermore, both cryptographic protection and secure overwriting are too expensive for direct application to IoT technology. To address these problems, we proposed a hybrid assured deletion technique that combines cryptographic protection with secure overwriting on a semi-trusted cloud host. By moving the computation operations of assured deletion from the IoT device to a semi-trusted cloud host, we reduce the latency of the operations while relieving the IoT device of the processing cost. By combining cryptographic protection with secure overwriting, the outsourced data is safeguarded from both vulnerabilities. We evaluated the performance and attack surface of the proposed assured deletion technique through latency measurement and exposure analysis, respectively. The results show that the latency of the hybrid assured deletion technique was comparable to the cryptographic protection solution’s latency, and that the hybrid assured deletion technique minimized the overall attack surface of the cloud-based IoT network.
Bio: Bryan Hall is a Systems Validation Engineer at Intel Corporation and a Ph.D. Student in Computer Engineering under Professor Manimaran Govindarasu. His research focuses on data security in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the implementation of “privacy-by-design” into cloud-based IoT networks. Bryan completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at the University of North Texas in May of 2011 and his Master of Science in Computer Engineering in May of 2018 at Iowa State University. He aims to complete his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University in May 2021.