Potential mass surveillance and privacy violations in proximity-based social applications

Proximity-based social applications let users interact with people that are currently close to them, by revealing some information about their preferences and whereabouts. This information is acquired through passive geo-localisation and used to build a sense of serendipitous discovery of people, places and interests. Unfortunately, while this class of applications opens different interactions possibilities for people in urban settings, obtaining access to certain identity information could lead a possible privacy attacker to identify and follow a user in their movements in a specific period of time. The same information shared through the platform could also help an attacker to link the victim's online profiles to physical identities. We analyse a set of popular dating application that shares users relative distances within a certain radius and show how, by using the information shared on these platforms, it is possible to formalise a multilateration attack, able to identify the user actual position. The same attack can also be used to follow a user in all their movements within a certain period of time, therefore identifying their habits and Points of Interest across the city. Furthermore we introduce a social attack which uses common Facebook likes to profile a person and finally identify their real identity

An active, ontology-driven network service for Internet collaboration

Web portals have emerged as an important means of collaboration on the WWW, and the integration of ontologies promises to make them more accurate in how they serve users’ collaboration and information location requirements. However, web portals are essentially a centralised architecture resulting in difficulties supporting seamless roaming between portals and collaboration between groups supported on different portals. This paper proposes an alternative approach to collaboration over the web using ontologies that is de-centralised and exploits content-based networking. We argue that this approach promises a user-centric, timely, secure and location-independent mechanism, which is potentially more scaleable and universal than existing centralised portals

The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity

Social sensing services use humans as sensor carriers, sensor operators and sensors themselves in order to provide situation-awareness to applications. This promises to provide a multitude of benefits to the users, for example in the management of natural disasters or in community empowerment. However, current social sensing services depend on Internet connectivity since the services are deployed on central Cloud platforms. In many circumstances, Internet connectivity is constrained, for instance when a natural disaster causes Internet outages or when people do not have Internet access due to economical reasons. In this paper, we propose the emerging Fog Computing infrastructure to become a key-enabler of social sensing services in situations of constrained Internet connectivity. To this end, we develop a generic architecture and API of Fog-enabled social sensing services. We exemplify the usage of the proposed social sensing architecture on a number of concrete use cases from two different scenarios.Comment: Ruben Mayer, Harshit Gupta, Enrique Saurez, and Umakishore Ramachandran. 2017. The Fog Makes Sense: Enabling Social Sensing Services With Limited Internet Connectivity. In Proceedings of The 2nd International Workshop on Social Sensing, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, April 21 2017 (SocialSens'17), 6 page

Highly intensive data dissemination in complex networks

This paper presents a study on data dissemination in unstructured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network overlays. The absence of a structure in unstructured overlays eases the network management, at the cost of non-optimal mechanisms to spread messages in the network. Thus, dissemination schemes must be employed that allow covering a large portion of the network with a high probability (e.g.~gossip based approaches). We identify principal metrics, provide a theoretical model and perform the assessment evaluation using a high performance simulator that is based on a parallel and distributed architecture. A main point of this study is that our simulation model considers implementation technical details, such as the use of caching and Time To Live (TTL) in message dissemination, that are usually neglected in simulations, due to the additional overhead they cause. Outcomes confirm that these technical details have an important influence on the performance of dissemination schemes and that the studied schemes are quite effective to spread information in P2P overlay networks, whatever their topology. Moreover, the practical usage of such dissemination mechanisms requires a fine tuning of many parameters, the choice between different network topologies and the assessment of behaviors such as free riding. All this can be done only using efficient simulation tools to support both the network design phase and, in some cases, at runtime