title: Privacy-preserving systems around security, trust and identity
Creators: name: Papadopoulos, Pavlos
Publisher: name: Edinburgh Napier University
Year: 2023

description: Data has proved to be the most valuable asset in a modern world of rapidly advancing technologies. Companies are trying to maximise their profits by getting valuable insights from collected data about people’s trends and behaviour which often can be considered personal and sensitive. Additionally, sophisticated adversaries often target organisations aiming to exfiltrate sensitive data to sell it to third parties or ask for ransom. Hence, the privacy assurance of the individual data producers is a matter of great importance who rely on simply trusting that the services they use took all the necessary countermeasures to protect them.

Distributed ledger technology and its variants can securely store data and preserve its privacy with novel characteristics. Additionally, the concept of self-sovereign identity, which gives the control back to the data subjects, is an expected future step once these approaches mature further. Last but not least, big data analysis typically occurs through machine learning techniques. However, the security of these techniques is often questioned since adversaries aim to exploit them for their benefit.

The aspect of security, privacy and trust is highlighted throughout this thesis which investigates several emerging technologies that aim to protect and analyse sensitive data compared to already existing systems, tools and approaches in terms of security guarantees and performance efficiency.

The contributions of this thesis derive to i) the presentation of a novel distributed ledger infrastructure tailored to the domain name system, ii) the adaptation of this infrastructure to a critical healthcare use case, iii) the development of a novel self-sovereign identity healthcare scenario in which a data scientist analyses sensitive data stored in the premises of three hospitals, through a privacy-preserving machine learning approach, and iv) the thorough investigation of adversarial attacks that aim to exploit machine learning intrusion detection systems by “tricking” them to misclassify carefully crafted inputs such as malware identified as benign.

A significant finding is that the security and privacy of data are often neglected since they do not directly impact people’s lives. It is common for the protection and confidentiality of systems, even of critical nature, to be an afterthought, which is considered merely after malicious intents occur. Further, emerging sets of technologies, tools, and approaches built with fundamental security and privacy principles, such as the distributed ledger technology, should be favoured by existing systems that can adopt them without significant changes and compromises. Additionally, it has been presented that the decentralisation of machine learning algorithms through self-sovereign identity technologies that provide novel end-to-end encrypted channels is possible without sacrificing the valuable utility of the original machine learning algorithms.

However, a matter of great importance is that alongside technological advancements, adversaries are becoming more sophisticated in this area and are trying to exploit the aforementioned machine learning approaches and other similar ones for their benefit through various tools and approaches. Adversarial attacks pose a real threat to any machine learning algorithm and artificial intelligence technique, and their detection is challenging and often problematic. Hence, any security professional operating in this domain should consider the impact of these attacks and the protection countermeasures to combat or minimise them.