Distributed Multi-authority Attribute-based Encryption Scheme for Friend Discovery in Mobile Social Networks

AbstractIn recent years, the rapid expansion of the capability of portable devices, cloud servers and cellular network technologies is the wind beneath the wing of mobile social networks. Compared to traditional web-based online social networks, the mobile social networks can assist users to easily discover and make new social interaction with others. A challenging task is to protect the privacy of the users’ profiles and communications. Existing works are mainly based on traditional cryptographic methods, such as homomorphic and group signatures, which are very computationally costly. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed multi-authority attribute-based encryption scheme to efficiently achieve privacy-preserving without additional special signatures. In addition, the proposed scheme can achieve fine-grained and flexible access control. Detailed analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and practicability of our scheme

User-Centric Security and Privacy Mechanisms in Untrusted Networking and Computing Environments

Our modern society is increasingly relying on the collection, processing, and sharing of digital information. There are two fundamental trends: (1) Enabled by the rapid developments in sensor, wireless, and networking technologies, communication and networking are becoming more and more pervasive and ad hoc. (2) Driven by the explosive growth of hardware and software capabilities, computation power is becoming a public utility and information is often stored in centralized servers which facilitate ubiquitous access and sharing. Many emerging platforms and systems hinge on both dimensions, such as E-healthcare and Smart Grid. However, the majority information handled by these critical systems is usually sensitive and of high value, while various security breaches could compromise the social welfare of these systems. Thus there is an urgent need to develop security and privacy mechanisms to protect the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of the collected data, and to control the disclosure of private information. In achieving that, two unique challenges arise: (1) There lacks centralized trusted parties in pervasive networking; (2) The remote data servers tend not to be trusted by system users in handling their data. They make existing security solutions developed for traditional networked information systems unsuitable. To this end, in this dissertation we propose a series of user-centric security and privacy mechanisms that resolve these challenging issues in untrusted network and computing environments, spanning wireless body area networks (WBAN), mobile social networks (MSN), and cloud computing. The main contributions of this dissertation are fourfold. First, we propose a secure ad hoc trust initialization protocol for WBAN, without relying on any pre-established security context among nodes, while defending against a powerful wireless attacker that may or may not compromise sensor nodes. The protocol is highly usable for a human user. Second, we present novel schemes for sharing sensitive information among distributed mobile hosts in MSN which preserves user privacy, where the users neither need to fully trust each other nor rely on any central trusted party. Third, to realize owner-controlled sharing of sensitive data stored on untrusted servers, we put forward a data access control framework using Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), that supports scalable fine-grained access and on-demand user revocation, and is free of key-escrow. Finally, we propose mechanisms for authorized keyword search over encrypted data on untrusted servers, with efficient multi-dimensional range, subset and equality query capabilities, and with enhanced search privacy. The common characteristic of our contributions is they minimize the extent of trust that users must place in the corresponding network or computing environments, in a way that is user-centric, i.e., favoring individual owners/users

Security and Privacy in Online Social Networks

The explosive growth of Online Social Networks (OSNs) over the past few years has redefined the way people interact with existing friends and especially make new friends. OSNs have also become a great new marketplace for trade among the users. However, the associated privacy risks make users vulnerable to severe privacy threats. In this dissertation, we design protocols for private distributed social proximity matching and a private distributed auction based marketplace framework for OSNs. In particular, an OSN user looks for matching profile attributes when trying to broaden his/her social circle. However, revealing private attributes is a potential privacy threat. Distributed private profile matching in OSNs mainly involves using cryptographic tools to compute profile attributes matching privately such that no participating user knows more than the common profile attributes. In this work, we define a new asymmetric distributed social proximity measure between two users in an OSN by taking into account the weighted profile attributes (communities) of the users and that of their friends’. For users with different privacy requirements, we design three private proximity matching protocols with increasing privacy levels. Our protocol with highest privacy level ensures that each user’s proximity threshold is satisfied before revealing any matching information. The use of e-commerce has exploded in the last decade along with the associated security and privacy risks. Frequent security breaches in the e-commerce service providers’ centralized servers compromise consumers’ sensitive private and financial information. Besides, a consumer’s purchase history stored in those servers can be used to reconstruct the consumer’s profile and for a variety of other privacy intrusive purposes like directed marketing. To this end, we propose a secure and private distributed auction framework called SPA, based on decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) for the first time in the literature. The participants in SPA require no trust among each other, trade anonymously, and the security and privacy of the auction is guaranteed. The efficiency, in terms of communication and computation, of proposed private auction protocol is at least an order of magnitude better than existing distributed private auction protocols and is suitable for marketplace with large number of participants

User-centric privacy preservation in Internet of Things Networks

Recent trends show how the Internet of Things (IoT) and its services are becoming more omnipresent and popular. The end-to-end IoT services that are extensively used include everything from neighborhood discovery to smart home security systems, wearable health monitors, and connected appliances and vehicles. IoT leverages different kinds of networks like Location-based social networks, Mobile edge systems, Digital Twin Networks, and many more to realize these services. Many of these services rely on a constant feed of user information. Depending on the network being used, how this data is processed can vary significantly. The key thing to note is that so much data is collected, and users have little to no control over how extensively their data is used and what information is being used. This causes many privacy concerns, especially for a na ̈ıve user who does not know the implications and consequences of severe privacy breaches. When designing privacy policies, we need to understand the different user data types used in these networks. This includes user profile information, information from their queries used to get services (communication privacy), and location information which is much needed in many on-the-go services. Based on the context of the application, and the service being provided, the user data at risk and the risks themselves vary. First, we dive deep into the networks and understand the different aspects of privacy for user data and the issues faced in each such aspect. We then propose different privacy policies for these networks and focus on two main aspects of designing privacy mechanisms: The quality of service the user expects and the private information from the user’s perspective. The novel contribution here is to focus on what the user thinks and needs instead of fixating on designing privacy policies that only satisfy the third-party applications’ requirement of quality of service

The 10 Research Topics in the Internet of Things

Since the term first coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant momentum as a technology to connect physical objects to the Internet and to facilitate machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communications. Over the past two decades, IoT has been an active area of research and development endeavours by many technical and commercial communities. Yet, IoT technology is still not mature and many issues need to be addressed. In this paper, we identify 10 key research topics and discuss the research problems and opportunities within these topics.Comment: 10 pages. IEEE CIC 2020 vision pape