4,685 research outputs found
A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user's demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess usersā preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoplesā willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users
A survey on pseudonym changing strategies for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks
The initial phase of the deployment of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) has
begun and many research challenges still need to be addressed. Location privacy
continues to be in the top of these challenges. Indeed, both of academia and
industry agreed to apply the pseudonym changing approach as a solution to
protect the location privacy of VANETs'users. However, due to the pseudonyms
linking attack, a simple changing of pseudonym shown to be inefficient to
provide the required protection. For this reason, many pseudonym changing
strategies have been suggested to provide an effective pseudonym changing.
Unfortunately, the development of an effective pseudonym changing strategy for
VANETs is still an open issue. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey
and classification of pseudonym changing strategies. We then discuss and
compare them with respect to some relevant criteria. Finally, we highlight some
current researches, and open issues and give some future directions
Energy efficient privacy preserved data gathering in wireless sensor networks having multiple sinks
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) generally have a many-to-one structure so that event information flows from sensors to a unique sink. In recent WSN applications, many-tomany structures are evolved due to need for conveying collected event information to multiple sinks at the same time. This study proposes an anonymity method bases on k-anonymity for preventing record disclosure of collected event information in WSNs. Proposed method takes the anonymity requirements of multiple sinks into consideration by providing different levels of privacy for each destination sink. Attributes, which may identify of an event owner, are generalized or encrypted in order to
meet the different anonymity requirements of sinks. Privacy guaranteed event information can be multicasted to all sinks instead of sending to each sink one by one. Since minimization of energy consumption is an important design criteria for WSNs, our method enables us to multicast the same event information
to multiple sinks and reduce energy consumption
Octopus: A Secure and Anonymous DHT Lookup
Distributed Hash Table (DHT) lookup is a core technique in structured
peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. Its decentralized nature introduces security and
privacy vulnerabilities for applications built on top of them; we thus set out
to design a lookup mechanism achieving both security and anonymity, heretofore
an open problem. We present Octopus, a novel DHT lookup which provides strong
guarantees for both security and anonymity. Octopus uses attacker
identification mechanisms to discover and remove malicious nodes, severely
limiting an adversary's ability to carry out active attacks, and splits lookup
queries over separate anonymous paths and introduces dummy queries to achieve
high levels of anonymity. We analyze the security of Octopus by developing an
event-based simulator to show that the attacker discovery mechanisms can
rapidly identify malicious nodes with low error rate. We calculate the
anonymity of Octopus using probabilistic modeling and show that Octopus can
achieve near-optimal anonymity. We evaluate Octopus's efficiency on Planetlab
with 207 nodes and show that Octopus has reasonable lookup latency and
manageable communication overhead
Evaluation of Anonymized ONS Queries
Electronic Product Code (EPC) is the basis of a pervasive infrastructure for
the automatic identification of objects on supply chain applications (e.g.,
pharmaceutical or military applications). This infrastructure relies on the use
of the (1) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to tag objects in
motion and (2) distributed services providing information about objects via the
Internet. A lookup service, called the Object Name Service (ONS) and based on
the use of the Domain Name System (DNS), can be publicly accessed by EPC
applications looking for information associated with tagged objects. Privacy
issues may affect corporate infrastructures based on EPC technologies if their
lookup service is not properly protected. A possible solution to mitigate these
issues is the use of online anonymity. We present an evaluation experiment that
compares the of use of Tor (The second generation Onion Router) on a global
ONS/DNS setup, with respect to benefits, limitations, and latency.Comment: 14 page
- ā¦