Privacy and performance trade-off in cyber-physical systems

The increasing number of instances of privacy leakage in CPSs and the corresponding serious consequences have caused great worry in our society. In most privacy preserving mechanisms proposed to protect sensitive individual information, system performance is compromised at the same time. In this article, we consider the trade-off between individual privacy and system performance in CPSs. After introducing the CPS architecture and the basic definition of differential privacy, we formulate the performance optimization problem subject to a given differential privacy requirement. For a simplified system, we derive the closed-form optimal system performance under the desired privacy requirement. Simulation results are provided to verify the proposed mechanism, which balances the trade-off between system performance and privacy. We also identify future research topics on the privacy preserving problem in CPSs.