Time-Series Pattern Based Effective Noise Generation for Privacy Protection on Cloud

Cloud computing is proposed as an open and promising computing paradigm where customers can deploy and utilize IT services in a pay-as-you-go fashion while saving huge capital investment in their own IT infrastructure. Due to the openness and virtualization, various malicious service providers may exist in these cloud environments, and some of them may record service data from a customer and then collectively deduce the customer's private information without permission. Therefore, from the perspective of cloud customers, it is essential to take certain technical actions to protect their privacy at client side. Noise obfuscation is an effective approach in this regard by utilizing noise data. For instance, noise service requests can be generated and injected into real customer service requests so that malicious service providers would not be able to distinguish which requests are real ones if these requests’ occurrence probabilities are about the same, and consequently related customer privacy can be protected. Currently, existing representative noise generation strategies have not considered possible fluctuations of occurrence probabilities. In this case, the probability fluctuation could not be concealed by existing noise generation strategies, and it is a serious risk for the customer's privacy. To address this probability fluctuation privacy risk, we systematically develop a novel time-series pattern based noise generation strategy for privacy protection on cloud. First, we analyze this privacy risk and present a novel cluster based algorithm to generate time intervals dynamically. Then, based on these time intervals, we investigate corresponding probability fluctuations and propose a novel time-series pattern based forecasting algorithm. Lastly, based on the forecasting algorithm, our novel noise generation strategy can be presented to withstand the probability fluctuation privacy risk. The simulation evaluation demonstrates that our strategy can significantly improve the effectiveness of such cloud privacy protection to withstand the probability fluctuation privacy risk.