34,490 research outputs found
Efficient location privacy-aware forwarding in opportunistic mobile networks
This paper proposes a novel fully distributed and collaborative k-anonymity protocol (LPAF) to protect users’ location information and ensure better privacy while forwarding queries/replies to/from untrusted location-based service (LBS) over opportunistic mobile networks (OppMNets. We utilize a lightweight multihop Markov-based stochastic model for location prediction to guide queries toward the LBS’s location and to reduce required resources in terms of retransmission overheads. We develop a formal analytical model and present theoretical analysis and simulation of the proposed protocol performance. We further validate our results by performing extensive simulation experiments over a pseudo realistic city map using map-based mobility models and using real-world data trace to compare LPAF to existing location privacy and benchmark protocols. We show that LPAF manages to keep higher privacy levels in terms of k-anonymity and quality of service in terms of success ratio and delay, as compared with other protocols, while maintaining lower overheads. Simulation results show that LPAF achieves up to an 11% improvement in success ratio for pseudorealistic scenarios, whereas real-world data trace experiments show up to a 24% improvement with a slight increase in the average delay
Distributed Approaches for Location Privacy
With the advance of location technologies, people can now
determine their location in various ways, for instance, with GPS or based
on nearby cellphone towers. These technologies have led to the
introduction of location-based services, which allow people to get
information relevant to their current location. Location privacy is of
utmost concern for such location-based services, since knowing a person's
location can reveal information about her activities or her interests.
In this thesis, we first focus on location-based services that need to
know only a person's location, but not her identity. We propose a solution
using location cloaking based on k-anonymity, which requires neither a
single trusted location broker, which is a central server that knows
everybody's location, nor trust in all users of the system and that
integrates nicely with existing infrastructures. We present two such
protocols. The evaluation of our sample implementation demonstrates that
one of the protocol is sufficiently fast to be practical, but the
performance of the other protocol is not acceptable for its use in
practice.
In addition to the distributed k-anonymity protocol we then propose four
protocols---Louis, Lester, Pierre and Wilfrid--- for a specific, identity
required, location-based service: the nearby-friend application, where
users (and their devices) can learn information about their friends'
location if and only if their friends are actually nearby. Our solutions
do not require any central trusted server or only require a semi-trusted
third party that dose not learn any location information. Moreover, users
of our protocol do not need to be members of the same cellphone provider,
as in existing approaches. The evaluation on our implementation shows that
all of the four protocols are efficient
ABAKA : a novel attribute-based k-anonymous collaborative solution for LBSs
The increasing use of mobile devices, along with advances in telecommunication systems, increased the popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs). In LBSs, users share their exact location with a potentially untrusted Location-Based Service Provider (LBSP). In such a scenario, user privacy becomes a major con- cern: the knowledge about user location may lead to her identification as well as a continuous tracing of her position. Researchers proposed several approaches to preserve users’ location privacy. They also showed that hiding the location of an LBS user is not enough to guarantee her privacy, i.e., user’s pro- file attributes or background knowledge of an attacker may reveal the user’s identity. In this paper we propose ABAKA, a novel collaborative approach that provides identity privacy for LBS users considering users’ profile attributes. In particular, our solution guarantees p -sensitive k -anonymity for the user that sends an LBS request to the LBSP. ABAKA computes a cloaked area by collaborative multi-hop forwarding of the LBS query, and using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). We ran a thorough set of experiments to evaluate our solution: the results confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposal
A survey on pseudonym changing strategies for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks
The initial phase of the deployment of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) has
begun and many research challenges still need to be addressed. Location privacy
continues to be in the top of these challenges. Indeed, both of academia and
industry agreed to apply the pseudonym changing approach as a solution to
protect the location privacy of VANETs'users. However, due to the pseudonyms
linking attack, a simple changing of pseudonym shown to be inefficient to
provide the required protection. For this reason, many pseudonym changing
strategies have been suggested to provide an effective pseudonym changing.
Unfortunately, the development of an effective pseudonym changing strategy for
VANETs is still an open issue. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey
and classification of pseudonym changing strategies. We then discuss and
compare them with respect to some relevant criteria. Finally, we highlight some
current researches, and open issues and give some future directions
On the Measurement of Privacy as an Attacker's Estimation Error
A wide variety of privacy metrics have been proposed in the literature to
evaluate the level of protection offered by privacy enhancing-technologies.
Most of these metrics are specific to concrete systems and adversarial models,
and are difficult to generalize or translate to other contexts. Furthermore, a
better understanding of the relationships between the different privacy metrics
is needed to enable more grounded and systematic approach to measuring privacy,
as well as to assist systems designers in selecting the most appropriate metric
for a given application.
In this work we propose a theoretical framework for privacy-preserving
systems, endowed with a general definition of privacy in terms of the
estimation error incurred by an attacker who aims to disclose the private
information that the system is designed to conceal. We show that our framework
permits interpreting and comparing a number of well-known metrics under a
common perspective. The arguments behind these interpretations are based on
fundamental results related to the theories of information, probability and
Bayes decision.Comment: This paper has 18 pages and 17 figure
Design and Implementation of S-MARKS: A Secure Middleware for Pervasive Computing Applications
As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People engage with not a single device for a specific purpose but many devices interacting with each other in the course of ordinary activity. With such prevalence of pervasive technology, the interaction between portable devices needs to be continuous and imperceptible to device users. Pervasive computing requires a small, scalable and robust network which relies heavily on the middleware to resolve communication and security issues. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of S-MARKS which incorporates device validation, resource discovery and a privacy module
Dovetail: Stronger Anonymity in Next-Generation Internet Routing
Current low-latency anonymity systems use complex overlay networks to conceal
a user's IP address, introducing significant latency and network efficiency
penalties compared to normal Internet usage. Rather than obfuscating network
identity through higher level protocols, we propose a more direct solution: a
routing protocol that allows communication without exposing network identity,
providing a strong foundation for Internet privacy, while allowing identity to
be defined in those higher level protocols where it adds value.
Given current research initiatives advocating "clean slate" Internet designs,
an opportunity exists to design an internetwork layer routing protocol that
decouples identity from network location and thereby simplifies the anonymity
problem. Recently, Hsiao et al. proposed such a protocol (LAP), but it does not
protect the user against a local eavesdropper or an untrusted ISP, which will
not be acceptable for many users. Thus, we propose Dovetail, a next-generation
Internet routing protocol that provides anonymity against an active attacker
located at any single point within the network, including the user's ISP. A
major design challenge is to provide this protection without including an
application-layer proxy in data transmission. We address this challenge in path
construction by using a matchmaker node (an end host) to overlap two path
segments at a dovetail node (a router). The dovetail then trims away part of
the path so that data transmission bypasses the matchmaker. Additional design
features include the choice of many different paths through the network and the
joining of path segments without requiring a trusted third party. We develop a
systematic mechanism to measure the topological anonymity of our designs, and
we demonstrate the privacy and efficiency of our proposal by simulation, using
a model of the complete Internet at the AS-level
Pretty Private Group Management
Group management is a fundamental building block of today's Internet
applications. Mailing lists, chat systems, collaborative document edition but
also online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter use group management
systems. In many cases, group security is required in the sense that access to
data is restricted to group members only. Some applications also require
privacy by keeping group members anonymous and unlinkable. Group management
systems routinely rely on a central authority that manages and controls the
infrastructure and data of the system. Personal user data related to groups
then becomes de facto accessible to the central authority. In this paper, we
propose a completely distributed approach for group management based on
distributed hash tables. As there is no enrollment to a central authority, the
created groups can be leveraged by various applications. Following this
paradigm we describe a protocol for such a system. We consider security and
privacy issues inherently introduced by removing the central authority and
provide a formal validation of security properties of the system using AVISPA.
We demonstrate the feasibility of this protocol by implementing a prototype
running on top of Vuze's DHT
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