4,576 research outputs found
Shortest Path Computation with No Information Leakage
Shortest path computation is one of the most common queries in location-based
services (LBSs). Although particularly useful, such queries raise serious
privacy concerns. Exposing to a (potentially untrusted) LBS the client's
position and her destination may reveal personal information, such as social
habits, health condition, shopping preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. The
only existing method for privacy-preserving shortest path computation follows
the obfuscation paradigm; it prevents the LBS from inferring the source and
destination of the query with a probability higher than a threshold. This
implies, however, that the LBS still deduces some information (albeit not
exact) about the client's location and her destination. In this paper we aim at
strong privacy, where the adversary learns nothing about the shortest path
query. We achieve this via established private information retrieval
techniques, which we treat as black-box building blocks. Experiments on real,
large-scale road networks assess the practicality of our schemes.Comment: VLDB201
Location Privacy in Spatial Crowdsourcing
Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) is a new platform that engages individuals in
collecting and analyzing environmental, social and other spatiotemporal
information. With SC, requesters outsource their spatiotemporal tasks to a set
of workers, who will perform the tasks by physically traveling to the tasks'
locations. This chapter identifies privacy threats toward both workers and
requesters during the two main phases of spatial crowdsourcing, tasking and
reporting. Tasking is the process of identifying which tasks should be assigned
to which workers. This process is handled by a spatial crowdsourcing server
(SC-server). The latter phase is reporting, in which workers travel to the
tasks' locations, complete the tasks and upload their reports to the SC-server.
The challenge is to enable effective and efficient tasking as well as reporting
in SC without disclosing the actual locations of workers (at least until they
agree to perform a task) and the tasks themselves (at least to workers who are
not assigned to those tasks). This chapter aims to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art in protecting users' location privacy in spatial
crowdsourcing. We provide a comparative study of a diverse set of solutions in
terms of task publishing modes (push vs. pull), problem focuses (tasking and
reporting), threats (server, requester and worker), and underlying technical
approaches (from pseudonymity, cloaking, and perturbation to exchange-based and
encryption-based techniques). The strengths and drawbacks of the techniques are
highlighted, leading to a discussion of open problems and future work
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 Ìıve 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 userâs 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 applicationsâ requirement of quality of service
Privacy protection in context aware systems.
Smartphones, loaded with usersâ personal information, are a primary computing device for many. Advent of 4G networks, IPV6 and increased number of subscribers to these has triggered a host of application developers to develop softwares that are easy to install on the mobile devices. During the application download process, users accept the terms and conditions that permit revelation of private information. The free application markets are sustainable as the revenue model for most of these service providers is through profiling of users and pushing advertisements to the users. This creates a serious threat to users privacy and hence it is important that âprivacy protection mechanismsâ should be in place to protect the usersâ privacy. Most of the existing solutions falsify or modify the information in the service request and starve the developers of their revenue. In this dissertation, we attempt to bridge the gap by proposing a novel integrated CLOPRO framework (Context Cloaking Privacy Protection) that achieves Identity privacy, Context privacy and Query privacy without depriving the service provider of sustainable revenue made from the CAPPA (Context Aware Privacy Preserving Advertising). Each service request has three parameters: identity, context and actual query. The CLOPRO framework reduces the risk of an adversary linking all of the three parameters. The main objective is to ensure that no single entity in the system has all the information about the user, the queries or the link between them, even though the user gets the desired service in a viable time frame. The proposed comprehensive framework for privacy protecting, does not require the user to use a modified OS or the service provider to modify the way an application developer designs and deploys the application and at the same time protecting the revenue model of the service provider. The system consists of two non-colluding servers, one to process the location coordinates (Location server) and the other to process the original query (Query server). This approach makes several inherent algorithmic and research contributions. First, we have proposed a formal definition of privacy and the attack. We identified and formalized that the privacy is protected if the transformation functions used are non-invertible. Second, we propose use of clustering of every component of the service request to provide anonymity to the user. We use a unique encrypted identity for every service request and a unique id for each cluster of users that ensures Identity privacy. We have designed a Split Clustering Anonymization Algorithms (SCAA) that consists of two algorithms Location Anonymization Algorithm (LAA) and Query Anonymization Algorithm (QAA). The application of LAA replaces the actual location for the users in the cluster with the centroid of the location coordinates of all users in that cluster to achieve Location privacy. The time of initiation of the query is not a part of the message string to the service provider although it is used for identifying the timed out requests. Thus, Context privacy is achieved. To ensure the Query privacy, the generic queries (created using QAA) are used that cover the set of possible queries, based on the feature variations between the queries. The proposed CLOPRO framework associates the ads/coupons relevant to the generic query and the location of the users and they are sent to the user along with the result without revealing the actual user, the initiation time of query or the location and the query, of the user to the service provider. Lastly, we introduce the use of caching in query processing to improve the response time in case of repetitive queries. The Query processing server caches the query result. We have used multiple approaches to prove that privacy is preserved in CLOPRO system. We have demonstrated using the properties of the transformation functions and also using graph theoretic approaches that the userâs Identity, Context and Query is protected against the curious but honest adversary attack, fake query and also replay attacks with the use of CLOPRO framework. The proposed system not only provides \u27k\u27 anonymity, but also satisfies the \u3c k; s \u3e and \u3c k; T \u3e anonymity properties required for privacy protection. The complexity of our proposed algorithm is O(n)
Obfuscation and anonymization methods for locational privacy protection : a systematic literature review
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe mobile technology development combined with the business model of a majority
of application companies is posing a potential risk to individualsâ privacy.
Because the industry default practice is unrestricted data collection. Although,
the data collection has virtuous usage in improve services and procedures; it also
undermines userâs privacy. For that reason is crucial to learn what is the privacy
protection mechanism state-of-art.
Privacy protection can be pursued by passing new regulation and developing
preserving mechanism. Understanding in what extent the current technology is
capable to protect devices or systems is important to drive the advancements
in the privacy preserving field, addressing the limits and challenges to deploy
mechanism with a reasonable quality of Service-QoS level.
This research aims to display and discuss the current privacy preserving
schemes, its capabilities, limitations and challenges
- âŠ