CNS Core: Small: Enabling Privacy-Preserving Routing-on-Context in IoT

在过去的50年里，互联网已经从最初的仅连接计算机的数据网络发展到物联网（IoT）——一个不仅连接计算机而且连接物理世界中的事物的全球信息物理网络。与计算机相比，被连接的事物通过感知与其物理环境（即上下文）紧密结合。因此，物联网应用通常是面向上下文的，即意识到并敏感于构成应用兴趣的物理环境，而传统的基于计算机的互联网应用是与上下文无关的。尽管连接的事物和计算机之间存在明显的差异，并且互联网流量正在从计算机通信转向面向上下文的物联网应用，但令人惊讶的是，今天的互联网路由原则与长期存在的基于连接的路由相比几乎没有变化，其特征是将特定源节点与特定目标节点连接起来。面向上下文的物联网应用程序在这种传统路由模型下表现不佳，因为这些应用程序本质上针对的是应用程序上下文，而不是特定的目标节点。为了更好地支持未来互联网中的物联网，该项目寻求建立一种新的高效且保护隐私的路由技术，该技术基于目标应用环境，但不泄露此信息。该项目将为保护数千万物联网用户的隐私提供急需的解决方案，同时支持他们高效使用物联网，从而对国家经济和社会福祉产生深远影响。该项目还将执行一项全面的教育计划，以扩大其影响，重点是代表性不足和少数群体。该项目将推动基于上下文的隐私保护路由技术的发展。PI将开发用于加密空间路由的新工具和技术，从而根据加密的位置信息直接计算和表示地理路线。特别是，将开发两种新技术：(i)用于加密空间的基于空间填充曲线的新方法；（ii）基于kademlia树的路由技术，在加密空间中实现高效且保护隐私的地理路由。该项目还将为所提出的方法在各种特殊条件下（如移动性和不同的攻击模型）建立效率和隐私权衡。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Over the past 50 years, Internet has evolved from initially a data network connecting only computers to an Internet of Things (IoT) - a global cyber-physical network that connects not only computers but also things in the physical world. Compared with computers, the connected things are closely coupled with their physical environment (a.k.a. the context) through sensing. As a result, IoT applications are typically context-oriented, i.e., being aware of and sensitive to the physical circumstances that form the interest of the application, while conventional computer-based Internet applications are context agnostic. Despite the distinct disparities between connected things and computers and the fact that Internet traffic is shifting from computer communication to context-oriented IoT applications, surprisingly, today's Internet routing principle has little change than the long-standing connectivity-based routing, characterized as connecting a specific source node with a specific destination node. Context-oriented IoT applications do not perform well under this traditional routing model, because what these applications are essentially targeting on is the application context, rather than a specific destination node. To better support IoT in the future Internet, this project seeks to establish a new efficient and privacy-preserving routing technique that is based on the targeted application context but does not disclose this information. This project will provide the urgently-needed solution to protect the privacy of tens of millions of IoT users while supporting their efficient usage of IoT, thus making a deep impact on the nation's economy and social well-being. This project will also carry out a comprehensive education plan to broaden its impact, with an emphasis on underrepresented and minority groups. This project will advance the state of the art in privacy-preserving context-based routing. The PI will develop new tools and techniques for routing in the encrypted space, whereby geographic routes are computed and represented directly based upon encrypted location information. In particular, two novel techniques will be developed: (i) a novel space-filling-curve-based method for encrypting the space; (ii) a Kademlia-tree-based routing technique to achieve efficient and privacy-preserving geographic routing in the encrypted space. The project will also establish the efficiency-privacy tradeoff for the proposed methods under various special conditions such as mobility and different attack models.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.