PrivStream: A privacy-preserving inference framework on IoT streaming data at the edge

Edge computing combining with artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled the timely processing and analysis of streaming data produced by IoT intelligent applications. However, it causes privacy risk due to the data exchanges between local devices and untrusted edge servers. The powerful analytical capability of AI further exacerbates the risks because it can even infer private information from insensitive data. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving IoT streaming data analytical framework based on edge computing, called PrivStream, to prevent the untrusted edge server from making sensitive inferences from the IoT streaming data. It utilizes a well-designed deep learning model to filter the sensitive information and combines with differential privacy to protect against the untrusted edge server. The noise is also injected into the framework in the training phase to increase the robustness of PrivStream to differential privacy noise. Taking into account the dynamic and real-time characteristics of streaming data, we realize PrivStream with two types of models to process data segment with fixed length and variable length, respectively, and implement it on a distributed streaming platform to achieve real-time streaming data transmission. We theoretically prove that Privstream satisfies $\epsilon$-differential privacy and experimentally demonstrate that PrivStream has better performance than the state-of-the-art and has acceptable computation and storage overheads.