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With the rapid development of emerging network technologies such as cloud computing, the background server-side of public health information services is widely deployed on the untrusted cloud, which has become one of the main threats of user health privacy leakage. To this end, this paper proposes an agent-based algorithm for the protection for user privacy health topics based on identity replacement. Its basic idea is to deploy a group of intermediate agents between the server-side and the client-side, to replace the identity of each health service request issued by client users and then submit it to the server-side, thereby, making it difficult to identify the real user corresponding to each request, and then improving the security of user health topic privacy on the completely-untrusted server-sides. Then, this paper proposes a client-based algorithm for the selection of intermediate agents, which evenly distributes the request data issued by client users to all the agents after topic identification and privacy computation for the request data, to improve the security of user health topic privacy on the incompletely-trusted agent-side. Finally, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, i.e., it can effectively improve the security of user privacy health topics on the untrusted server-side, under the premises of no changes to user usage habits, server-side architecture, service algorithm, service accuracy and service efficiency, so as to provide a theoretical and technical foundation for building a privacy-preserving platform for public health information services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews a large number of research achievements relevant to user privacy protection in an untrusted network environment, and then analyzes and evaluates their application limitations in personalized information retrieval, to establish the conditional constraints that an effective approach for user preference privacy protection in personalized information retrieval should meet, thus providing a basic reference for the solution of this problem. First, based on the basic framework of a personalized information retrieval platform, we establish a complete set of constraints for user preference privacy protection in terms of security, usability, efficiency, and accuracy. Then, we comprehensively review the technical features for all kinds of popular methods for user privacy protection, and analyze their application limitations in personalized information retrieval, according to the constraints of preference privacy protection. The results show that personalized information retrieval has higher requirements for users' privacy protection, i.e., it is required to comprehensively improve the security of users' preference privacy on the untrusted server-side, under the precondition of not changing the platform, algorithm, efficiency, and accuracy of personalized information retrieval. However, all kinds of existing privacy methods still cannot meet the above requirements. This paper is an important study attempt to the problem of user preference privacy protection of personalized information retrieval, which can provide a basic reference and direction for the further study of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a digital library, an increasingly important problem is how to prevent the exposure of user privacy in an untrusted network. This study aims to design an effective approach for the protection of user privacy in a digital library, by consulting the basic ideas of encryption and anonymization. In our proposed approach, any privacy data, which can identify user's real identity, should be encrypted first before being submitted to the library server, to achieve anonymization of user identity. Then, to solve the problem of querying encrypted privacy data, additional feature data are constructed for the encrypted data, such that much of the query processing can be completed at the server-side, without decrypting the data, thereby improving the efficiency of each kind of user query operation. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, which can improve the security of users' data privacy and behavior privacy on the untrusted server-side, without compromising the availability (i. e. accuracy, efficiency, and usability) of digital library services. This paper provides a valuable study attempt at the protection of digital library users' privacy, which has a positive influence on the development of a privacy-preserving library in an untrusted network environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalized recommendation has demonstrated its effectiveness in improving the problem of information overload on the Internet. However, evidences show that due to the concerns of personal privacy, users’ reluctance to disclose their personal information has become a major barrier for the development of personalized recommendation. In this paper, we propose to generate a group of fake preference profiles, so as to cover up the user sensitive subjects, and thus protect user personal privacy in personalized recommendation. First, we present a client-based framework for user privacy protection, which requires not only no change to existing recommendation algorithms, but also no compromise to the recommendation accuracy. Second, based on the framework, we introduce a privacy protection model, which formulates the two requirements that ideal fake preference profiles should satisfy: (1) the similarity of feature distribution, which measures the effectiveness of fake preference profiles to hide a genuine user preference profile; and (2) the exposure degree of sensitive subjects, which measures the effectiveness of fake preference profiles to cover up the sensitive subjects. Finally, based on a subject repository of product classification, we present an implementation algorithm to well meet the privacy protection model. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text retrieval enables people to efficiently obtain the desired data from massive text data, so has become one of the most popular services in information retrieval community. However, while providing great convenience for users, text retrieval results in a serious issue on user privacy. In this paper, we propose a dummy-based approach for text retrieval privacy protection. Its basic idea is to use well-designed dummy queries to cover up user queries and thus protect user privacy. First, we present a client-based system framework for the protection of user privacy, which requires no change to the existing algorithm of text retrieval, and no compromise to the accuracy of text retrieval. Second, we define a user privacy model to formulate the requirements that ideal dummy queries should meet, i.e., (1) having highly similar feature distributions with user queries, and (2) effectively reducing the significance of user query topics. Third, by means of the knowledge derived from Wikipedia, we present an implementation algorithm to construct a group of ideal dummy queries that can well meet the privacy model. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation. The results show that by constructing dummy queries that have similar feature distributions but unrelated topics with user queries, the privacy behind users' textual queries can be effectively protected, under the precondition of not compromising the accuracy and usability of text retrieval. • Propose a dummy-based privacy protection approach for text retrieval • Define a privacy model to formulate the requirements ideal dummy queries should meet • Present an implementation algorithm that can meet the user privacy model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Propose a privacy-preservation signaling game for edge-based IoT networks. • Obtain optimal privacy preservation strategies from theoretical and practical views. • Address the problem of obtaining the convergent game equilibrium in practice. • Have a lower computational complexity available to real-life implementation. Data privacy leakage can be severe when a malicious Internet of Things (IoT) node sends requests to gather private data from an edge-computing-based IoT cloud storage system across the edge nodes. To solve this problem, a privacy-preservation signaling game for edge-computing-based IoT networks is proposed to characterize the interactions between an IoT node and its corresponding edge node when managing an IoT resource-grant system. Optimal privacy preservation strategies for edge nodes are then theoretically derived. A signaling Q-learning algorithm is then designed to address the problem of achieving convergent equilibrium and game parameters from a practical perspective. The theoretical results are validated using simulations that focus on two statistical points (i.e., the optimal probability of an IoT node requesting maliciously and the posterior probability of an IoT node being malicious). By comparing the proposed signaling Q-learning algorithm with the greedy algorithm benchmark, the proposed algorithm is shown to more effectively decrease the optimal probability of an IoT node sending malicious requests. Thus, privacy preservation for edge-computing-based IoT cloud storage systems can be strengthened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]