ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Pervasive Computing : Distributed Systems : Education : Student Projects : Abstract

TimeCrypt: A Scalable Private Time Series Data Store (B/M/L)

Status: Offen

Motivation

Recent years have seen explosive growth in devices and services that automatically collect, aggregate, and analyze time series data, and this trend is only expected to accelerate with the proliferation of low-cost sensors and the adoption of IoT. Wearables, autonomous vehicles, data center metrics are only a few examples. However, with this growth we are also experiencing growing concerns over protecting the data and the privacy of users. A key challenge in ensuring data privacy is that the need for privacy co-exists with the desire to extract value from the data and extracting value often implies granting users and third-party services access to the data. It goes without saying that any measure to ensure data privacy must be efficient enough to not be noticed by the user, in order to be considered for real-world deployments. We have designed such a privacy-preserving data processing system: TimeCrypt is the first system that augments time series data stores with efficient and privacy-preserving processing of time series data, while providing cryptographic means to restrict the query scope based on the data owners policies. For example, a user can choose to simultaneously share hourly averages of their measured heart rate with their doctor and per-minute averages with their trainer but only for the duration of their workout session. Similarly, a datacenter operator might share resource utilization levels with a tenant but only for the duration of her job.

Your Role

We have several theses opportunities within the TimeCrypt project. Particularly, we are a looking for students who are interested in working on: scaling-up TimeCrypt, building apps atop of TimeCrypt, and integrating TimeCrypt with conventional time series databases. We will enable this based on the TimeCrypt framework (source code). More info on TimeCrypt can be found on https://timecrypt.io/

Requirements:

We are particularly interested in students with a background and research interests in at least one of the following areas: systems, networking, or security. The student is expected to have good experience with Java, C++, or python and be interested in working with new tools. We expect our students to be highly motivated to work on their topics and to cooperate with the supervisors regularly to discuss current progress and next steps.

What we offer:

This topic will give you the opportunity to learn and get involved in timely systems and security research problems. To speed up your learning curve we will support you with tutorials and how-tos. We offer you a great work atmosphere, which is both casual and challenging, motivated advisors, and a good coffee machine ;)

Contact