A review paper on preserving privacy in mobile environments

Technology is improving day-by-day and so is the usage of mobile devices. Every activity that would involve manual and paper transactions can now be completed in seconds using your fingertips. On one hand, life has become fairly convenient with the help of mobile devices, whereas on the other hand security of the data and the transactions occurring in the process have been under continuous threat. This paper, re-evaluates the different policies and procedures used for preserving the privacy of sensitive data and device location.. Policy languages have been very vital in the mobile environments as they can be extended/used significantly for sending/receiving any data. In the mobile environment users always go to service providers to access various services. Hence, communications between the service providers and mobile handsets needs to be secured. Also, the data access control needs to be in place. A section of this paper will review the communication paths and channels and their related access criteria. This paper is a contribution to the mobile domain, showing the possible attacks related to privacy and the various mechanisms used to preserve the end-user privacy. In addition, it also gives acomparison of the different privacy preserving methods in mobile environments to provide guidance to the readers. Finally, the paper summarises future research challenges in the area of privacy preservation. This paper examines the ‘where’ problem and in particular, examines tradeoffs between enforcing location security at a device vs. enforcing location security at an edge location server. This paper also sketches an implementation of location security solution at both the device and the edge location server and presents detailed experiments using real mobility and user profile data sets collected from multiple data sources (taxicabs, Smartphones)

A Privacy-Friendly Architecture for Mobile Social Networking Applications

The resources and localization abilities available in modern smartphones have provided a huge boost to the popularity of location-based applications. In these applications, users send their current locations to a central service provider and can receive content or an enhanced experience predicated on their provided location. Privacy issues with location- based applications can arise from a central entity being able to store large amounts of information about users (e.g., contact information, attributes) and locations (e.g., available businesses, users present). We propose an architecture for a privacy-friendly location hub to encourage the development of mobile location-based social applications with privacy- preserving features. Our primary goal is to store information such that no entity in our architecture can link a user’s identity to her location. We also aim to decouple storing data from manipulating data for social networking purposes. Other goals include designing an architecture flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases and avoiding considerable client-side computation. Our architecture consists of separate server components for storing information about users and storing information about locations, as well as client devices and optional com- ponents in the cloud for supporting applications. We describe the design of API functions exposed by the server components and demonstrate how they can be used to build some sample mobile location-based social applications. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided with in-depth descriptions of how each function was realized, as well as experi- ments examining the practicality of our architecture. Finally, we present two real-world applications developed on the Android platform to demonstrate how these applications work from a user’s perspective

My private cloud--granting federated access to cloud resources

We describe the research undertaken in the six month JISC/EPSRC funded My Private Cloud project, in which we built a demonstration cloud file storage service that allows users to login to it, by using their existing credentials from a configured trusted identity provider. Once authenticated, users are shown a set of accounts that they are the owners of, based on their identity attributes. Once users open one of their accounts, they can upload and download files to it. Not only that, but they can then grant access to their file resources to anyone else in the federated system, regardless of whether their chosen delegate has used the cloud service before or not. The system uses standard identity management protocols, attribute based access controls, and a delegation service. A set of APIs have been defined for the authentication, authorisation and delegation processes, and the software has been released as open source to the community. A public demonstration of the system is available online

Privacy Protection and Mobility Enhancement in Internet

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The Internet has substantially embraced mobility since last decade. Cellular data network carries majority of Internet mobile access traffic and become the de facto solution of accessing Internet in mobile fashion, while many clean-slate Internet mobility solutions were proposed but none of them has been largely deployed. Internet mobile users increasingly concern more about their privacy as both researches and real-world incidents show leaking of communication and location privacy could lead to serious consequences. Just the communication itself between mobile user and their peer users or websites could leak considerable privacy of mobile user, such as location history, to other parties. Additionally, comparing to ordinary Internet access, connecting through cellular network yet provides equivalent connection stability or longevity. In this research we proposed a novelty paradigm that leverages concurrent far-side proxies to maximize network location privacy protection and minimize interruption and performance penalty brought by mobility.To avoid the deployment feasibility hurdle we also investigated the root causes impeding popularity of existing Internet mobility proposals and proposed guidelines on how to create an economical feasible solution for this goal. Based on these findings we designed a mobility support system offered as a value-added service by mobility service providers and built on elastic infrastructure that leverages various cloud aided designs, to satisfy economic feasibility and explore the architectural trade-offs among service QoS, economic viability, security and privacy

A Comprehensive Survey on the Cooperation of Fog Computing Paradigm-Based IoT Applications: Layered Architecture, Real-Time Security Issues, and Solutions

The Internet of Things (IoT) can enable seamless communication between millions of billions of objects. As IoT applications continue to grow, they face several challenges, including high latency, limited processing and storage capacity, and network failures. To address these stated challenges, the fog computing paradigm has been introduced, purpose is to integrate the cloud computing paradigm with IoT to bring the cloud resources closer to the IoT devices. Thus, it extends the computing, storage, and networking facilities toward the edge of the network. However, data processing and storage occur at the IoT devices themselves in the fog-based IoT network, eliminating the need to transmit the data to the cloud. Further, it also provides a faster response as compared to the cloud. Unfortunately, the characteristics of fog-based IoT networks arise traditional real-time security challenges, which may increase severe concern to the end-users. However, this paper aims to focus on fog-based IoT communication, targeting real-time security challenges. In this paper, we examine the layered architecture of fog-based IoT networks along working of IoT applications operating within the context of the fog computing paradigm. Moreover, we highlight real-time security challenges and explore several existing solutions proposed to tackle these challenges. In the end, we investigate the research challenges that need to be addressed and explore potential future research directions that should be followed by the research community.©2023 The Authors. Published by IEEE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Server-Aided Privacy-Preserving Proximity Testing

Proximity testing is at the core of many Location-Based online Services (LBS) which we use in our daily lives to order taxis, find places of interest nearby, connect with people. Currently, most such services expect a user to submit his location to them and trust the LBS not to abuse this information, and use it only to provide the service. Existing cases of such information being misused (e.g., by the LBS employees or criminals who breached its security) motivates the search for better solutions that would ensure the privacy of user data, and give users control of how their data is being used.In this thesis, we address this problem using cryptographic techniques. We propose three cryptographic protocols that allow two users to perform proximity testing (check if they are close enough to each other) with the help of two servers.In the papers 1 and 2, the servers are introduced in order to allow users not to be online at the same time: one user may submit their location to the servers and go offline, the other user coming online later and finishing proximity testing. The drastically improves the practicality of such protocols, since the mobile devices that users usually run may not always be online. We stress that the servers in these protocols merely aid the users in performing the proximity testing, and none of the servers can independently extract the user data.In the paper 3, we use the servers to offload the users\u27 computation and communication to. The servers here pre-generate correlated random data and send it to users, who can use it to perform a secure proximity testing protocol faster. Paper 3, together with the paper 2, are highly practical: they provide strong security guarantees and are suitable to be executed on resource-constrained mobile devices. In fact, the work of clients in these protocols is close to negligible as most of the work is done by servers