Secure Personal Memory-Sharing with Co-located People and Places

Abstract

The abundance of interconnected devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) offers a powerful vision on how automated capture systems can aid humans remember their lives better. Already today, mobile and wearable devices allow people to create rich logs of their daily experiences in the form of photos, videos, GPS traces, or even physiological data. This activity is often called "lifelogging", and has led to the so-called "quantified self" movement where people capture detailed traces of their everyday lives in order to better understand themselves. An interesting avenue to explore in this context is the possibility of capturing lifelog data for the sake of augmenting one's memory. Contemporary psychology theory suggests that captured experiences of daily events can be used to generate cues (hints) which, when reviewed, can improve subsequent long-term recall of these memories. However, limitations of on-body placement of wearable devices can yield poor quality data and restricts capture to a first-person perspective. The focus of this work is to enable the secure and automatic exchange of one's lifelog streams with both co-located peers and any available capture devices in an IoT infrastructure, in order to construct a more comprehensive representation of a previous experience, which can thus help one to create more effective cues. We present a privacy-aware architecture for this exchange and report on a proof-of-concept prototype implementation.

Securely Storing and Sharing Memory Cues in Memory Augmentation Systems: A Practical Approach

“…This introduces significant security implications for memory augmentation systems. In designing a solution for addressing the threat of memory manipulation, we consider the following requirements [9]: R1: Secure Personal Repositories. Memories (and, eventually, any memory cues generated from them) should be stored in secure and user-controlled repositories.…”

“…The camera can also be used to seamlessly share its captured images with similar cameras of co-located peers, using a secure protocol that we described in previous work [9]. Our existing system uses a tangible user interface (TUI) with insitu physical gestures to give users maximum control about both the capture and sharing of experiences -a detailed description of the overall system and its controls can be found in [34].…”

“…At the outset, the next counter value c + 1 (step 7) and the camera's serial number S are assigned to the image by writing them to the image's filename (step 8). This operation is authenticated by first hashing the image's content 9 and then concatenating it with c and S before computing the MAC token over this (step 9). The produced tokens are embedded in the image's provenance certificate Π I (the provisioning of these certificates was explained previously in section V) which in turn is stored in a separate auxiliary file as explained in step 9 of Protocol 1.…”

“…An overview of our system and how we envision its use can be found in our prior publications [4]- [8]. One important feature of our system is that it allows users to share their memories with other users [9]. While sharing our photos is a process we are very familiar with in order to reminisce together about an event, or show others what they missed (e.g., looking at physical prints together, or sharing digital photos on social media), sharing in our system is meant to enrich memory cue generation by offering a richer set of perspective for a given experience.…”

Pervasive Data Science

“…Since many human experiences are the product of social interactions, and since memory of those experiences is continuously shaped by ongoing interaction with those (and other) individuals, it is not the case that a single centralised digital memory will meet an individual's needs. Instead, we anticipate that our memory vault will be a distributed memory, with interconnections spanning multiple instances, and with data from others being made readily available to those who shared an experience [2].…”