Privacy-Preserving Multimedia Mobile Cloud Computing Using Protective Perturbation

TL;DR

This paper introduces $PMC^2$, a privacy-preserving multimedia cloud computing framework that uses secure cloud-based perturbation and neural compression to reduce resource and bandwidth issues while maintaining service accuracy.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel framework that shifts perturbation generation to the cloud using secure computing and employs neural compression, addressing resource and bandwidth challenges in privacy-preserving multimedia services.

Findings

Superior latency, power efficiency, and bandwidth consumption compared to existing methods.

Maintains high accuracy in multimedia services despite privacy-preserving perturbations.

Effective resource management enabling practical deployment on mobile devices.

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing has been adopted in many multimedia applications, where the resource-constrained mobile device sends multimedia data (e.g., images) to remote cloud servers to request computation-intensive multimedia services (e.g., image recognition). While significantly improving the performance of the mobile applications, the cloud-based mechanism often causes privacy concerns as the multimedia data and services are offloaded from the trusted user device to untrusted cloud servers. Several recent studies have proposed perturbation-based privacy preserving mechanisms, which obfuscate the offloaded multimedia data to eliminate privacy exposures without affecting the functionality of the remote multimedia services. However, the existing privacy protection approaches require the deployment of computation-intensive perturbation generation on the resource-constrained mobile devices. Also, the obfuscated images are typically not compliant with the standard image compression algorithms and suffer from significant bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we develop a novel privacy-preserving multimedia mobile cloud computing framework, namely $PMC^2$, to address the resource and bandwidth challenges. $PMC^2$ employs secure confidential computing in the cloud to deploy the perturbation generator, which addresses the resource challenge while maintaining the privacy. Furthermore, we develop a neural compressor specifically trained to compress the perturbed images in order to address the bandwidth challenge. We implement $PMC^2$ in an end-to-end mobile cloud computing system, based on which our evaluations demonstrate superior latency, power efficiency, and bandwidth consumption achieved by $PMC^2$ while maintaining high accuracy in the target multimedia service.