Achieving Personalized $k$-Anonymity-Based Content Privacy for Autonomous Vehicles in CPS

Enabled by the industrial Internet, intelligent transportation has made remarkable achievements such as autonomous vehicles by carnegie mellon university (CMU) Navlab, Google Cars, Tesla, etc. Autonomous vehicles benefit, in various aspects, from the cooperation of the industrial Internet and cyber-physical systems. In this process, users in autonomous vehicles submit query contents, such as service interests or user locations, to service providers. However, privacy concerns arise since the query contents are exposed when the users are enjoying the services queried. Existing works on privacy preservation of query contents rely on location perturbation or $k$ -anonymity, and they suffer from insufficient protection of privacy or low query utility incurred by processing multiple queries for a single query content. To achieve sufficient privacy preservation and satisfactory query utility for autonomous vehicles querying services in cyber-physical systems, this article proposes a novel privacy notion of client-based personalized $k$ -anonymity (CP $k$ A). To measure the performance of CP $k$ A, we present a privacy metric and a utility metric, based on which, we formulate two problems to achieve the optimal CP $k$ A in term of privacy and utility. An approach, including two modules, to establish mechanisms which achieve the optimal CP $k$ A is presented. The first module is to build in-group mechanisms for achieving the optimal privacy within each content group. The second module includes linear programming-based methods to compute the optimal grouping strategies. The in-group mechanisms and the grouping strategies are combined to establish optimal CP $k$ A mechanisms, which achieve the optimal privacy or the optimal utility. We employ real-life datasets and synthetic prior distributions to evaluate the CP $k$ A mechanisms established by our approach. The evaluation results illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the established mechanisms.