Privacy-Preserving t-Incidence for WiFi-based Mobility Analytics

National audiencePhysical mobility analytics have gained attention lately. As people become more equipped with ubiquitous wireless-communication-enabled mobile appliances, they tend to leave signatures of their presence wherever they go. One particular example is Wi-Fi enabled devices which continuously send packets (called “probe requests”) to access points around it even if no connection is established between them. Aggregating a list of such probe requests over a number of geographically distributed monitoring nodes gives rise to a rich set of physical mobility analytics such as visitor density in rush hours and most frequently taken routes.However, privacy of individual users is a grave concern. To address this concern we propose to implement physical mobility analytics using a collection of privacy-preserving primitives of set operations. The sets are the MAC addresses of the devices observed by one monitoring node. There is at least one set per monitoring node. An monitoring node may have more than one set if the MAC addresses are split according to the time of reception. The primitives we propose are the t-incidences of these sets. We present an ε-differentially pan-private algorithm to estimate the t-incidence of n sets, up to multiplicative error O(α), given three (ε/3)-differentially pan-private Bloom filters for each of those sets

Sustainability and Data Collection in the Smart City - A Case Study of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Tracking Project in Copenhagen

Cities around the world are facing a multitude of urban challenges that demand that they change the way they plan and think about their city, with one of the ways of approaching sustainability being the Smart city. A core feature of the Smart city is the idea of collecting large quantities of data on the city, big data, which is then used in various city solutions. In the wake of this, several questions dealing with sustainability surface and some of them are: transparency, privacy, citizen involvement and choice. The aim of this study is to investigate these and the smart city strategy by doing a case study of Copenhagen and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tracking project that started in 2014. Classic theories of surveillance such as Foucault’s Panopticism are used to further deepen the analysis. The results show that the Wi-Fi tracking project is a part of Copenhagen’s Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) program and collects the MAC addresses from the smartphones of citizens moving through the project area with activated Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. As this is done without the consent of citizens, the legality of the project is questioned. As for privacy, there seems to have been a change in the debate in and around the municipality, however the communication of the Smart city strategy to the citizens remains unchanged. The study concludes that Copenhagen has been shown to focus more on climate change, with their goal of being CO2-neutral to 2025, private business partnerships, and the digital infrastructure in the form of the vision of Copenhagen Connecting, and less on citizen participation and choice in this transformation, in contrary to much of the Smart city theory. This study has contributed to the topic by giving some insight into the process of creating a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tracking system within a Smart city strategy, and some of the issues that can surface when establishing such a system.Denna studie granskar det urbana hållbarhetsarbetet i Köpenhamn, nämligen deras ”Smart city”- strategi, med fokus på ett specifikt spårningsprojekt som staden startat. Några aspekter som tas upp är integritet, medborgardeltagande och transparens. Som en konsekvens av en ökande urbanisering står städer världen över inför flera urbana utmaningar som kräver att de förändrar hur de planerar och arbetar strategiskt med staden. En strategi som ämnar att göra staden mer hållbar är det som kallas för den smarta staden, där tanken är att inkorporera teknologi i staden och att använda högteknologiska lösningar för att lösa de urbana utmaningarna. Inbyggt i detta är att samla stora mängder data på staden och all aktivitet i den, big data, vilket sedan används i olika lösningar och åtgärder. Detta kan exempelvis vara hur mycket dagvatten som flödar genom ett visst rör eller hur många bilar som trafikerar en viss väg per dag. Till följd av denna ökade datainsamling uppstår frågor som rör hållbarhet, som i sig rör transparens, integritet och medborgardeltagande. Syftet med denna studie är att analysera dessa och smart stad-strategin genom att göra en fallstudie på Köpenhamn och det spårningsprojekt (Wi-Fi och Bluetooth) som startades 2014. Intervjuer genomfördes med olika aktörer inom och utanför kommunen, såsom planerare, politiker samt forskare. Övervakningsteori användes även för att fördjupa analysen. Resultaten visar att spårningsprojektet är en del av Köpenhamns ”Intelligent Traffic System” program, som använder högteknologiska lösningar för att göra transportsystemet mer hållbart och smart. Spårningssystemet fungerar genom att det samlar in en unik kod som Wi-Fi och Bluetooth-enheter avger, såsom smarta telefoner, och kan genom att göra detta följa enheters rörelse över tid i projektområdet. Då detta görs utan medborgarnas medgivande, är systemets legala grund osäker. Vad gäller integritet, verkar en debatt ha uppkommit både inom och utanför kommunen, men detta har ännu inte ändrat kommunikationen av integritetsfrågor till invånarna. Sammanfattningsvis har studien visat att Köpenhamns hållbarhetsarbete fokuserar mer på klimatförändringarna, med sitt mål att bli CO2 neutrala till 2025, samarbeten med företag och visionen av en digital infrastruktur kallad Copenhagen Connecting, och mindre på medborgardeltagande, i motsats till mycket teori kring den smarta staden. Denna studie har bidragit till ämnet genom att ge en inblick i processen att starta ett spårningssystem(Wi-Fi och Bluetooth) som en del av en smart stad-strategi, och några av de problem som kan uppkomma när ett sådant system skapas. Handledare: Stefan Larsson (LUII) Examensarbete 30 hp i Tillämpad Klimatstrategi 2015 Biologiska institutionen, Lunds universite

Post-Quantum Era Privacy Protection for Intelligent Infrastructures

As we move into a new decade, the global world of Intelligent Infrastructure (II) services integrated into the Internet of Things (IoT) are at the forefront of technological advancements. With billions of connected devices spanning continents through interconnected networks, security and privacy protection techniques for the emerging II services become a paramount concern. In this paper, an up-to-date privacy method mapping and relevant use cases are surveyed for II services. Particularly, we emphasize on post-quantum cryptography techniques that may (or must when quantum computers become a reality) be used in the future through concrete products, pilots, and projects. The topics presented in this paper are of utmost importance as (1) several recent regulations such as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have given privacy a significant place in digital society, and (2) the increase of IoT/II applications and digital services with growing data collection capabilities are introducing new threats and risks on citizens' privacy. This in-depth survey begins with an overview of security and privacy threats in IoT/IIs. Next, we summarize some selected Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) suitable for privacy-concerned II services, and then map recent PET schemes based on post-quantum cryptographic primitives which are capable of withstanding quantum computing attacks. This paper also overviews how PETs can be deployed in practical use cases in the scope of IoT/IIs, and maps some current projects, pilots, and products that deal with PETs. A practical case study on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is presented to demonstrate how PETs can be applied in reality. Finally, we discuss the main challenges with respect to current PETs and highlight some future directions for developing their post-quantum counterparts

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe wireless radio channel is typically thought of as a means to move information from transmitter to receiver, but the radio channel can also be used to detect changes in the environment of the radio link. This dissertation is focused on the measurements we can make at the physical layer of wireless networks, and how we can use those measurements to obtain information about the locations of transceivers and people. The first contribution of this work is the development and testing of an open source, 802.11b sounder and receiver, which is capable of decoding packets and using them to estimate the channel impulse response (CIR) of a radio link at a fraction of the cost of traditional channel sounders. This receiver improves on previous implementations by performing optimized matched filtering on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) of the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), allowing it to operate at full bandwidth. The second contribution of this work is an extensive experimental evaluation of a technology called location distinction, i.e., the ability to identify changes in radio transceiver position, via CIR measurements. Previous location distinction work has focused on single-input single-output (SISO) radio links. We extend this work to the context of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio links, and study system design trade-offs which affect the performance of MIMO location distinction. The third contribution of this work introduces the "exploiting radio windows" (ERW) attack, in which an attacker outside of a building surreptitiously uses the transmissions of an otherwise secure wireless network inside of the building to infer location information about people inside the building. This is possible because of the relative transparency of external walls to radio transmissions. The final contribution of this dissertation is a feasibility study for building a rapidly deployable radio tomographic (RTI) imaging system for special operations forces (SOF). We show that it is possible to obtain valuable tracking information using as few as 10 radios over a single floor of a typical suburban home, even without precise radio location measurements

Bowdoin Orient v.132, no.1-24 (2002-2003)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1003/thumbnail.jp

Bowdoin Orient v.131, no.1-24 (1999-2000)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1000/thumbnail.jp

2012, UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 3, 2012 and December 26, 2012

Bowdoin Orient v.126, no.1-23 (1995-1996)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-1990s/1007/thumbnail.jp

The formulation of an author's 'other' in late postmodern fiction

Legal Immigrants is a darkly comedic fiction novel incorporating real-life news stories and historical research about lucrative German organized crime in the United States and abroad. The novel also details the bizarre misadventures that unravel when three motley siblings launch cataclysmic revenge on their significant others, whom they've learned are leading secret naughty lives. Brigitte Schneider, the eldest sibling, is a vigorous lawyer in Boston who just found out her boyfriend of five years has been sleeping with other women. Nikolaus, her middle-born brother, is a celebrity entertainment news producer in Manhattan who supports his manipulative 'actor' boyfriend. Their younger brother, Josef, is a strapping soccer star failing most his college classes in Tampa, whose pregnancy-faking girlfriend has been stealing from him since freshman year. In privileged Dallas society, their father, Xavier, CEO of the Schneider Building Company (a homebuilding and real estate facade for his illegal activity), must decide to whom he will leave the family business, now that he has survived a heart attack. His boisterous but stem Texan wife, Sofia, busies herself by preparing for the upcoming family reunion in Bavaria. Together, the Schneider siblings finally embrace the power and opportunity of their family's organized crime legacy - through suspenseful scheming and jovial, often alcoholic fraternal-sororal bonding. Legal Immigrants fuses together a sardonically dysfunctional family saga spanning over two decades with never-before-published factual organized crime information and an enthralling travel journey throughout South Germany

The Whitworthian 2007-2008

The Whitworthian student newspaper, September 2007-April 2008.https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/whitworthian/1092/thumbnail.jp