Theses and Dissertations Collection

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies sense people private information posing a new level of threat to individuals’ privacy. Conventionally, consumers have to take some actions to put their privacy at stake, but IoT devices are collecting people’s private data without them even noticing. Similarly, when investigating compromised IoT technologies, practitioners have to recover those private information from IoT devices, for evidence; mostly also without the consent of consumers. Digital forensics tools are capable of retrieving data the user considers not present in devices. This leads to a controversial debate on the need for strong privacy measures in the context of IoT forensics. This research aims at finding solutions to this highly fundamental issue that exposes user sensitive information that may go up to threatening lives of the IoT users. In this research, to explicate the problem more technically, a running example that maps the ISO 20137 standard to the IoT ecosystem is presented in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, a set of requirements that have to be fulfilled by IoT forensics models to preserve user privacy is presented. In Chapter 4, an IoT forensics model is developed by combining features in existing models proposed for different digital forensics domains. Finally, in chapter 5, a searchable encryption scheme that preserves user privacy throughout the process of IoT forensics is proposed.