Data privacy is concerned with ensuring the appropriateness of information flows in our digital world. We research various areas of data privacy, ranging from theory and fundamentals of privacy notions such as Differential Privacy (DP), its application to modern data processing methods such as machine learning, to practical applications of biometric data (e.g. in authentication) and their anonymization (e.g. in video recordings).

The following sections provide an overview of the different topics that we research at the chair.

Evaluating and Designing Anonymization Methods for Video

Julian Todt

Videos are captured ubiquitously in everyday life. This poses a risk to privacy, as biometric recognition methods can successfully infer identities and sensitive attributes of the persons captured in the video material. We aim to protect the privacy of people in video material, while still preserving the utility of the collected data.

Use cases

• Applications like smart cities, autonomous driving and medicine can profit from collected data
• Allow these domains to use available data while protecting the privacy of individuals in the videos

Methods

• Machine learning based attackers for evaluation
• Developing new anonymization methods using machine learning
• User studies to validate experimental results and to create data sets

Future

• Consideration of more biometric traits and their combination
• Better evaluate the utility of anonymizations
• Anonymizations that provide the utility required for more applications

Protecting Human Trajectory Data

Patricia Guerra-Balboa: Local DP Trajectory Anonymization
Àlex Miranda-Pascual: Enhancing Utility in DP Trajectory Protection

Trajectory data analysis can improve our daily lives, for example by helping us to avoid traffic jams or suggesting better routes. However, trajectory data can also reveal sensitive information of users in the form of the addresses and places that they have visited, like hospitals, doctor's offices, or bureaus of political parties. We want to preserve the utility of shared trajectory data, while avoiding the information leak for individuals.

Use cases

• Anonymization for trajectory data
• Private learning for trajectory data

Methods

• Adaptation of existing differential privacy mechanisms
• Creation of new mechanisms specifically tailored for trajectory data
• Definitions of new privacy metrics and notions to understand when a trajectory database is actually protected

Future

• Development of new privacy-preserving mechanisms that overcome the limitations of existing mechanisms, especially considering the data correlations that exist in (trajectory) databases
• Anonymization for dynamic data

Anonymizing Humans in Motion

Simon Hanisch

More and more data of human motion is captured, both due to the increasing technical feasibility (motion capture suits, depth cameras) as well as the increasing applications for it (such as virtual reality). As a result, there are two main questions: what makes human motion unique and what is important for the recognition of individuals? And how can we use human motion data without creating a privacy problem for the recorded person?

Use cases

• Anonymization for human motion data publishing
• Removing sensitive attributes (age, gender, …) from human motion data

Methods

• User studies to collect suitable biometric data for anonymization
• Machine learning to build recognition techniques against which we can evaluate
• Systematic feature analysis to understand the recognition process
• Anonymization technique development

Future

• Development of a better methodology for evaluating biometric anonymization performance
• Anonymization techniques for human gait
• Anonymization techniques for freehand gesture controls

Security and Privacy of Behavioral Data-Driven Applications

Matin Fallahi

Nowadays, everybody has to authenticate themselves several times per day — even you :-) Most of the time, we still use passwords for that, which come with many pitfalls. Can we do better?

Use cases

• Could be used everywhere, however, our current focus is on the Industry 4.0 (the next generation of factories!)
• We want to enable easy, hands-free authentication for workers

Methods

• Use AI on behavioral data to develop novel biometric systems that are secure, usable and provide a better level of privacy
• Build on behavioral biometrics like brainwaves, eye-gaze and more

Future

• Next generation of authentication systems

Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

Felix Morsbach

A lot of modern data analysis is done via machine learning and can create huge benefits for societies and businesses alike. However, not only do these models require a lot of data during their training, including personal and/or sensitive data, the final models also can leak information about the data that was used to train them. Privacy-preserving machine learning methods exist to mitigate these emerging privacy risks, but introduce an inherent privacy-utility trade-off, inhibiting their adoption. In our research, we aim to improve the applicability of privacy-preserving machine learning by understanding and alleviating this privacy-utility trade-off.

Use cases

• Train machine learning models with privacy guarantees on sensitive data
• Machine learning based generation of syntactic data with privacy guarantees
• Privacy-preserving generation and analysis of web click traces

Methods

• Empirical studies to improve the understanding of how different parts of machine learning pipelines affect the privacy-utility trade-off and the model's resistance to attacks
• Privacy threat modelling of machine learning based systems
• Develop generative models with differential privacy guarantees

Future

• Minimize data collection through on device model training