Private eHealth Box

Bachelor / Master Thesis

Project description

As IoT devices find their way to peoples households, their privacy is being compromised. Smart devices communicate constantly with their manufacturer’s online infrastructure to retrieve updates and upload information into the cloud for analysis and the user’s ease of access. The constant communication yields pattern from where information about the occupants can be retrieved. From your power consumption to whether or not you are home, or done with your evening shores. In the case of medical devices, patterns of communication, even if encrypted, yields patterns that could compromise a patient’s safety or well being.

The objective of this project is to build a privacy-aware IoT router, which will obfuscate the device-to-cloud communication to remove patterns. Two methods are proposed: 1) a communication response cashing mechanism for unencrypted communications. This approach enables the box to cache server responses, which minimizes external traffic and randomizes communication times. 2) Remote proxy; by encrypting and passing all communications through a proxy server, the pattern of which companies are being contacted from the home is disguised. As a result, the communication time series becomes harder to analyze.

Contact

Dr. Luis I. Lopera G.

• Job title: Researcher
• Address:
  
  Henkestraße 91, Haus 7, 1. OG
  91052 Erlangen
  Germany
• Phone number: +49 9131 85-23605
• Email: luis.i.lopera@fau.de

Category: Student Projects