Applying Privacy Patterns to the Internet of Things’ (IoT) Architecture

Abstract

The concept of cloud computing relies on central large datacentres with huge amounts of computational power. The rapidly growing Internet of Things with its vast amount of data showed that this architecture produces costly, inefficient and in some cases infeasible communication. Thus, fog computing, a new architecture with distributed computational power closer to the IoT devices was developed. So far, this decentralised fog-oriented architecture has only been used for performance and resource management improvements. We show how it could also be used for improving the users’ privacy. For that purpose, we map privacy patterns to the IoT / fog computing / cloud computing architecture. Privacy patterns are software design patterns with the focus to translate “privacy-by-design” into practical advice. As a proof of concept, for each of the used privacy patterns we give an example from a smart vehicle scenario to illustrate how the patterns could improve the users’ privacy.