Data Security and Privacy: Concepts, Approaches, and Research Directions

Data are today an asset more critical than ever for all organizations we may think of. Recent advances and trends, such as sensor systems, IoT, cloud computing, and data analytics, are making possible to pervasively, efficiently, and effectively collect data. However for data to be used to their full power, data security and privacy are critical. Even though data security and privacy have been widely investigated over the past thirty years, today we face new difficult data security and privacy challenges. Some of those challenges arise from increasing privacy concerns with respect to the use of data and from the need of reconciling privacy with the use of data for security in applications such as homeland protection, counterterrorism, and health, food and water security. Other challenges arise because the deployments of new data collection and processing devices, such as those used in IoT systems, increase the data attack surface. In this paper, we discuss relevant concepts and approaches for data security and privacy, and identify research challenges that must be addressed by comprehensive solutions to data security and privacy.