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)

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v

On Security Analysis of Recent Password Authentication and Key Agreement Schemes Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Secure and efficient mutual authentication and key agreement schemes form the basis for any robust network communication system. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has emerged as one of the most successful Public Key Cryptosystem that efficiently meets all the security challenges. Comparison of ECC with other Public Key Cryptosystems (RSA, Rabin, ElGamal) shows that it provides equal level of security for a far smaller bit size, thereby substantially reducing the processing overhead. This makes it suitable for constrained environments like wireless networks and mobile devices as well as for security sensitive applications like electronic banking, financial transactions and smart grids. With the successful implementation of ECC in security applications (e-passports, e-IDs, embedded systems), it is getting widely commercialized. ECC is simple and faster and is therefore emerging as an attractive alternative for providing security in lightweight device, which contributes to its popularity in the present scenario. In this paper, we have analyzed some of the recent password based authentication and key agreement schemes using ECC for various environments. Furthermore, we have carried out security, functionality and performance comparisons of these schemes and found that they are unable to satisfy their claimed security goals

Protocol for a Systematic Literature Review on Security-related Research in Ubiquitous Computing

Context: This protocol is as a supplementary document to our review paper that investigates security-related challenges and solutions that have occurred during the past decade (from January 2003 to December 2013). Objectives: The objective of this systematic review is to identify security-related challenges, security goals and defenses in ubiquitous computing by answering to three main research questions. First, demographic data and trends will be given by analyzing where, when and by whom the research has been carried out. Second, we will identify security goals that occur in ubiquitous computing, along with attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that have motivated the research. Finally, we will examine the differences in addressing security in ubiquitous computing with those in traditional distributed systems. Method: In order to provide an overview of security-related challenges, goals and solutions proposed in the literature, we will use a systematic literature review (SLR). This protocol describes the steps which are to be taken in order to identify papers relevant to the objective of our review. The first phase of the method includes planning, in which we define the scope of our review by identifying the main research questions, search procedure, as well as inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data extracted from the relevant papers are to be used in the second phase of the method, data synthesis, to answer our research questions. The review will end by reporting on the results. Results and conclusions: The expected results of the review should provide an overview of attacks, vulnerabilities and threats that occur in ubiquitous computing and that have motivated the research in the last decade. Moreover, the review will indicate which security goals are gaining on their significance in the era of ubiquitous computing and provide a categorization of the security-related countermeasures, mechanisms and techniques found in the literature. (authors' abstract)Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operation