Trust Based Privacy Protection Method in Pervasive Computing

In pervasive computing environments, resources and services are usually provided by a variety of different suppliers with multiple computing devices and from heterogeneous networks. Accordingly, various privacy protection methods with lots of privacy policies were used. Before some meaningful interaction starts or services offers, a certain level of trust must be established, this trust establishment and communication process may involve privacy information exchange. Consequently, a method for integrate the privacy protection methods and deal with privacy and trust tradeoff is necessary. In this paper, we propose a novel trust based privacy protection method by using a three levels trust based privacy protection model (TPPM). Our main contributions include: (1) TPPM can integrate the various privacy protection methods and specify privacy policies; (2) TPPM can automatic make privacy disclose decision with achieving the goal of less privacy information loss and more trust gain during the trust establishment and the interaction process; (3) our method can be used in kinds of applications scenarios flexibly. Simulation results and analysis show our method can accomplish privacy preserving and fast trust establishment well. Index Terms privacy protection; trust; pervasive computing; ontology; privacy loss entropy; trust gain entropy