MS, Computer Science, 2018
Agniva Banerjee was associated with the KnACC lab from 2016-2018. His primary research area was Cybersecurity, Natural Language Processing, Privacy and Data Science. He worked on the Data Privacy management using Policy compliant Blockchain structures project. For the project he developed the LinkShare framework for secure and auditable data sharing platform for helping organizations decide which data uses and applications are fair and appropriate. He also collaborated with Dr. Tim Finin on projects related to cognitive cybersecurity, where he contributed towards incorporating security instincts into new cyber-defense systems that analyze research reports, web text, threat data and other security-relevant structured and unstructured data.
He successfully defended his MS thesis in Summer 2018.
Title: Data Privacy Management Using Privacy Compliant Blockchain Structures
Committee: Dr. Karuna P. Joshi (Chair), Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Anupam Joshi
Abstract: An important requirement of any information management system is to protect data and resources against leak or improper modifications, while at the same time ensure data availability to legitimate users. Moreover, systems handling personal data must also track its provenance and be regularly audited to comply with regulations. By assuring auditable, privacy policy compliant actions, we can also guarantee that areas, where privacy policies have been technically enforced, are highlighted.
As part of this thesis, we have built a novel framework to automatically track details about how a consumer’s private data is stored, used and shared by a Cloud provider. We have created a semantically rich data privacy ontology and integrated it with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access-control and audit mechanism that enforces users’ data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. Our blockchain-based data-sharing solution addresses two of the most critical challenges specifically: transaction verification and permissioned data obfuscation. Our solution ensures accountability for data sharing in the cloud, by incorporating a secure and efficient system for end-to-end provenance. We concur that decisions regarding the collection, sharing, and use of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) must take into account both ethical and privacy considerations.
Keywords: Blockchain; Semantic Web; Privacy Policy; Big-Data; Ontology.
Agniva is currently working in Leap Orbit.