Anirban Basu

Hitachi, Ltd. · Research and Development Group

Introduction Digital technologies give researchers new opportunities to access the most personal thoughts of those who use them. The ethics and implications of using data from peoples’ everyday interactions have recently become a mainstream topic of concern (Lucivero, 2020). In some contexts, such as governance, it can be argued that algorithmicall...

This brief paper is about trust. It explores the phenomenon from various angles, with the implicit assumptions that trust can be measured in some ways, that trust can be compared and rated, and that trust is of worth when we consider entities from data, through artificial intelligences, to humans, with side trips along the way to animals. It explor...

Cross-border data sharing for knowledge generation is a challenging research direction since an application may access personal data stored in countries different from the one where the application is accessed from. In this article, we propose a cross-border data sharing platform where a global cloud is built atop multiple security gateways that ar...

In many application scenarios, such as cloud computing and network function virtualisation, entities from different domains or their interactions are short-lived. Yet, it is often necessary to ensure accountability of events recorded by such entities about their application-specific interactions. The distributed and multi-domain nature of this prob...

Data in cloud has always been a point of attraction for the cyber attackers. Nowadays healthcare data in cloud has become their new interest. Attacks on these healthcare data can result in annihilating consequences for the healthcare organi- zations. Decentralization of these cloud data can minimize the effect of attacks. Storing and running comput...

Healthcare data are grabbing the interest of cyber attackers in recent years. Annihilating consequences of healthcare data could be alleviated through decentralization. A peer to peer (P2P) network enables the property of decentralization, where different parties can store and run computation while keeping the sensitive health data private. Blockch...

This paper proposes a new conceptual architecture for authorization of mobile services based on blockchain technologies, and presents a design of procedures for heterogeneous mobile communication services. Furthermore, an extension of the procedures is considered in order to enhance privacy protection for users. The new architecture realizes the se...

A key paradigm of Information Centric Networking (ICN) is that the content-based security, privacy and access control are deployed directly in the network layer. However, there is a gap between security in the network and application layers. This creates a vulnerable space for cyber attacks from inside a device. To address this problem, we discuss...

In this work, we report security analysis of the recently proposed server-aided verifiable approximate set similarity computation protocol by Qiu et al. (Security in Cloud Computing 2016). This protocol uses a certain consistency check mechanism to verify the computation result returned by a potentially malicious server. According to the original p...

In order to avail of some service, a user may need to share with a service provider her personal chronological information, e.g., identity, financial record, health information and so on. In the context of financial organisations, a process often referred to as the know your customer (KYC) is carried out by financial organisations to collect inform...

The smart grid, as an emerging cyber-physical system, is attractive because of features such as distributed energy control and robust load fluctuation management. The demand Response (DR) component in smart grids helps in maintaining demand-supply balance and in controlling consumer side electricity bills. One of the visions of smart grids is to ha...

User-contributed content on the Internet has been growing at an extraordinary pace. Ranking vast amounts of such content, such as digital photographs, is handled well through user-driven ranking. It helps speeding up the ranking process while reflecting the opinions of the community. However, user-driven ranking can be often subjective and difficul...

We propose a Decentralized multi-authority Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (DCP-ABE) scheme, where any party can become an authority by creating a public key and generating private keys for the users by utilizing their attributes. Any user can encrypt data in terms of any monotone access structure over attributes issued from any chosen...

We are often presented with policy terms that we agree with but are unable to gauge our personal perceptions (e.g., in terms of associated risks) of those terms. In some cases, although partial agreement is acceptable (e.g., allowing a mobile application to access specific resources), one is unable to quantify, even in relative terms, perceptions s...

Time sequence data relating to users, such as medical histories and mobility data, are good candidates for data mining, but often contain highly sensitive information. Different methods in privacypreserving data publishing are utilised to release such private data so that individual records in the released data cannot be re-linked to specific users...

Smart grid is an emerging technology because of its attractive features, such as distributed energy control and robust load fluctuation management. Demand Response (DR) system is an important component of smart grid as it can help maintaining demand-supply balance and controlling electricity bills at the user end. One of the visions of smart grid t...

Opinions from people, evident in surveys and microblogging, for instance, may have bias or low user participation due to legitimate concerns about privacy and anonymity. To provide sender (the participant) anonymity, the identity of the message sender must be hidden from the message recipient (the opinion collector) and the contents of the actual m...

Opinions from people can either be biased or reflect low participation due to legitimate concerns about privacy and anonymity. To alleviate those concerns, the identity of a message sender should be disassociated from the message while the contents of the actual message should be hidden from any relaying nodes. We propose a novel message routing sc...

Proofs of Data Possession (PDPs) are protocols that allow a file owner to verify that a file stored at an outsourced server is stored entirely. From a security perspective, it must be difficult for the server to pass the verification protocol if the file is not available. Even though several efficient PDPs exist in the literature, to the best of ou...

Mobility data gathered from location sensors such as Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled phones and vehicles is valuable for spatio-temporal data mining for various location-based services (LBS). Such data is often considered sensitive and there exist many a mechanism for privacy preserving analyses of the data. Through various anonymisation me...

Cloud services provide advantages in terms of service scalability and availability of users' data, but increase concerns about the control that a user has over her own data. These concerns include not just issues related to access to the information itself, but issues about the effective deletion of the information by the cloud in compliance with t...

Collaborative filtering (CF) over large datasets requires significant computing power. Due to this data owning organizations often outsource the computation of CF (including some abstraction of the data itself) to a public cloud infrastructure. However, this leads to the question of how to verify the integrity of the outsourced computation. In this...

The growth of online social networks has seen the utilisation of these network graphs for the purpose of providing recommendations. Automated recommendations, however, do not take into account inter-personal trust levels that exist in a social network. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving trusted social feedback (TSF) scheme where users...

During the execution of a program the keys for encryption algorithms are in the random access memory (RAM) of the machine. Technically, it is easy to extract the keys from a dumped image of the memory. However, not many examples of such key extractions exist, especially during program execution. In this paper, we present a key extraction technique...

Trust has been extensively studied and its effectiveness demon-strated in recommender systems. Due to lack of explicit trust information in most systems, many trust metric ap-proaches have been proposed to infer implicit trust from user ratings. However, previous works have not compared these different approaches, and oftentimes focus only on the p...

With the growth of social networks, recommender systems have taken advantage of the social network graph structures to provide better recommendation. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving trusted social feedback (TSF) system, in which users obtain feedback on questions or items from their friends. It is different from and independent of a...

Ranking vast amounts of user-contributed content, such as digital photographs, is handled well through user-driven ranking, but user-driven ranking is often subjective and difficult to compare. The analytic hierarchy process helps making sense of subjective opinion, whereas finding a global ranking is a problem of rank aggregation of partially rank...

Network coding is a way of transmitting information where nodes in a network combine incoming packets into a single one to increase throughput in some scenarios, nodes wishing to get the original information can perform decoding when enough packets have been received. Given its efficiency, the exclusive or (XOR) operation is very popular for networ...

Security is an interesting area, one in which we may well be guilty of misunderstanding the very people we are working for whilst trying to protect them. It is often said that people (users) are a weak link in the security chain. This may be true, but there are nuances. In this chapter, the authors discuss some of the work they have done and are do...

A proof of Data Possession (PDP) allows a client to verify that a remote server is still in possession of a file entrusted to it. One way to design a PDP, is to compute a function depending on a secret and the file. Then, during the verification stage, the client reveals the secret input to the server who recomputes the function and sends the outpu...

Privacy and security concerns often prevent the sharing of users' data or even of the knowledge gained from it, thus deterring valuable information from being utilized. Privacy-preserving knowledge discovery, if done correctly, can alleviate this problem. One of the most important and widely used data mining techniques is that of classification. We...

We claim that the digital trust research area has tended to privilege the act of trusting while considering distrust a negative outcome. However, from the users perspective distrust might be as valid an option as trust (it may not be a good idea to trade, collaborate or exchange in a particular context). How do we evaluate digital environments that...

Recommender systems typically use collaborative filtering to make sense of huge and growing volumes of data. An emerging trend in industry has been to use public clouds to deal with the computing and storage requirements of such systems. This, however, comes at a price -- data privacy. Simply ensuring communication privacy does not protect against...

Security as an enabling paradigm has not succeeded half as well as we might have hoped. Systems are broken or breakable, and users (people) have something of a lack of faith, understanding, or patience with security measures that exist. Whilst secure systems and solutions are the backbone of a working interconnected system of systems, they are not...

Recommender systems use, amongst others, a mechanism called collaborative filtering (CF) to predict the rating that a user will give to an item given the ratings of other items provided by other users. While reasonably accurate CF can be achieved with various well-known techniques, preserving the privacy of rating data from individual users poses a...

Online dating is one domain, which would benefit from the application of computational trust. One of the problems with the application of traditional computational trust models, as identified in our previous work, is authenticity of information provided by parties which helps other users ascertain whether they want to go on dates. In this position...

The prediction of the rating that a user is likely to give to an item, can be derived from the ratings of other items given by other users, through collaborative filtering (CF). However, CF raises concerns about the privacy of the individual user's rating data. To deal with this, several privacy-preserving CF schemes have been proposed. However, th...

In this position paper we examine some of the aspects of trust models, deployment, use and 'misuse,' and present a manifesto for the application of computational trust in sociotechnical systems. Computational Trust formalizes the trust processes in humans in order to allow artificial systems to better make decisions or give better advice. This is b...

The cloud is a utility computing infrastructure that has caused a paradigm shift in the way organisations requisition, allocate, and use IT resources. One big challenge is to preserve the confidentiality of information on the cloud. Most typical solutions use cryptographic techniques without considering how well suited they are to the cloud. This p...

Networking research often relies on simulation in order to test and evaluate new ideas. An important requirement of this process is that results must be reproducible so that other researchers can replicate, validate, and extend existing work. We look at the landscape of simulators for research in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks by conducting a survey o...

Rating-based collaborative filtering (CF) enables the prediction of the rating that a user will give to an item, based on the ratings of other items given by other users. However, doing this while preserving the privacy of rating data from individual users is a significant challenge. Several privacy preserving schemes have, so far been proposed in...

Farmers’ markets are the source of a rich and pleasurable consumption experience. In this chapter, we report on our attempts to support and augment these experiences through the deployment of pervasive advertising. We describe the ethnographic approach we used to delineate the areas of enjoyment and pleasure, how narratives are weaved around and th...

In the Naïve Bayes classification problem using a vertically partitioned dataset, the conventional scheme to preserve privacy of each partition uses a secure scalar product and is based on the assumption that the data is synchronised amongst common unique identities. In this paper, we attempt to discard this assumption in order to develop a more ef...

Peer-to-peer (p2p) protocols, like all distributed protocols, are complex, and therefore harder to debug and study in the wild. This is more true of existing p2p protocols, where changing the behaviour of the protocol --- however minor the change may be --- may result in unknown manifestations on the dynamics of the swarm using that protocol. In li...

Rating-based collaborative filtering (CF) predicts the rating that a user will give to an item, derived from the ratings of other items given by other users. Such CF schemes utilise either user neighbourhoods (i.e. user-based CF) or item neighbourhoods (i.e. item-based CF). Lemire and MacLachlan [1] proposed three related schemes for an item-based...

Trust models have been used widely in the literature in a number of different contexts. We examine an emotive scenario where trust would be extremely useful: online dating. We explore the use of a semiring-based trust model with online dating in a social network. Introductions are facilitated by friend-of-a-friend connections in the network in a ma...

Since pervasive computing applications are mostly designed to enhance existing social situations, such applications should take account of the trust relationships within the situation in their design. In this paper we describe the ethnographic approach we used to explore how trust is formed and maintained within a farmers’ market, and how this unde...

We report on designing augmented reality (AR) applications to support the practices of going shopping, using an accompanied shopping and reflection technique to assess the key points of engagement among shoppers and producers at a farmers' market. Our goal was to deploy innovative mobile technology in a low-tech context so that it supported everyda...

In client-server interaction scenarios over a network the problem of unso-licited network transactions is often encountered. In this paper, we propose a repu-tation model based on the behavioural history of long-lived network client identities as a solution to this problem. The reputations of clients are shared between trusted servers anonymously t...

Facilitating navigation through commercial spaces by third party systems is a likely step in pervasive computing. For these applications to fully engage people they must build trust relationships in a natural manner. We hypothesize that the use of an explicit trust model in the design of the application would improve the rate at which trust is gene...

In this paper, we discuss the current situation with respect to simulation usage in P2P research, testing the available P2P simulators against a proposed set of requirements, and surveying over 280 papers to discover what simulators are already being used. We found that no simulator currently meets all our requirements, and that simulation results...

In recent years, substantial academic research has focussed on solving the problem of email spam using reputation mechanisms (e.g., [1] and [2]) while others [3] have discussed the generalised problem of any unsolicited network transaction in client-server scenarios. We propose a reputation model based on behavioural history as a solution to this p...

There are a number of P2P overlay simulators developed by various research groups for use by the P2P academic community, however many still opt to use their own custom-built simulator. Having surveyed the area of Peer-to-Peer simulators in previous work, we believe that this is due to the simulators lacking key functionality such as mechanisms to g...

Traditional exhibitions in museums provide limited possibilities of interaction between the visitor and their artefacts. Usually, interaction is confined to reading labels with little information on the exhibits, shop booklets, and audio guided tours. These forms of interaction provide minimal information, and do not respond to a visitor's personal...

This paper describes ARCOLite, our low cost XML based client-server architecture for building and presenting digital heritage content in virtual museums. Our system includes components for creation and refinement of virtual artefacts including virtual reconstruction of buildings; XML content management, XML technologies for content repositories and...