Lower Bounds for Oblivious Near-Neighbor Search

We prove an $\Omega(d \lg n/ (\lg\lg n)^2)$ lower bound on the dynamic cell-probe complexity of statistically $\mathit{oblivious}$ approximate-near-neighbor search ($\mathsf{ANN}$) over the $d$-dimensional Hamming cube. For the natural setting of $d = \Theta(\log n)$, our result implies an $\tilde{\Omega}(\lg^2 n)$ lower bound, which is a quadratic improvement over the highest (non-oblivious) cell-probe lower bound for $\mathsf{ANN}$. This is the first super-logarithmic $\mathit{unconditional}$ lower bound for $\mathsf{ANN}$ against general (non black-box) data structures. We also show that any oblivious $\mathit{static}$ data structure for decomposable search problems (like $\mathsf{ANN}$) can be obliviously dynamized with $O(\log n)$ overhead in update and query time, strengthening a classic result of Bentley and Saxe (Algorithmica, 1980).Comment: 28 page

A Survey on Privacy Preserving and Content Protecting Location Based Queries

In today’s modern world, it is very easy for a person to know his/her location with the help of devices having GPS facility. When user’s location is provided to LBS, it is possible to user to know all location dependent information like location of friends or Nearest Restaurant, whether or traffic conditions. The massive use of mobile devices pave the way for the creation of wireless networks that can be used to exchange information based on locations. When the exchange of location information is done amongst entrusted parties, the privacy of the user could be in harmful. Existing protocol doesn’t work on many different mobile devices and another issue is that, Location Server (LS) should provide misleading data to user. So we are working on enhancement of this protocol

Privacy-Preserving Shortest Path Computation

Navigation is one of the most popular cloud computing services. But in virtually all cloud-based navigation systems, the client must reveal her location and destination to the cloud service provider in order to learn the fastest route. In this work, we present a cryptographic protocol for navigation on city streets that provides privacy for both the client's location and the service provider's routing data. Our key ingredient is a novel method for compressing the next-hop routing matrices in networks such as city street maps. Applying our compression method to the map of Los Angeles, for example, we achieve over tenfold reduction in the representation size. In conjunction with other cryptographic techniques, this compressed representation results in an efficient protocol suitable for fully-private real-time navigation on city streets. We demonstrate the practicality of our protocol by benchmarking it on real street map data for major cities such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C.Comment: Extended version of NDSS 2016 pape

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

Exploring Techniques for Providing Privacy in Location-Based Services Nearest Neighbor Query

Increasing numbers of people are subscribing to location-based services, but as the popularity grows so are the privacy concerns. Varieties of research exist to address these privacy concerns. Each technique tries to address different models with which location-based services respond to subscribers. In this work, we present ideas to address privacy concerns for the two main models namely: the snapshot nearest neighbor query model and the continuous nearest neighbor query model. First, we address snapshot nearest neighbor query model where location-based services response represents a snapshot of point in time. In this model, we introduce a novel idea based on the concept of an open set in a topological space where points belongs to a subset called neighborhood of a point. We extend this concept to provide anonymity to real objects where each object belongs to a disjointed neighborhood such that each neighborhood contains a single object. To help identify the objects, we implement a database which dynamically scales in direct proportion with the size of the neighborhood. To retrieve information secretly and allow the database to expose only requested information, private information retrieval protocols are executed twice on the data. Our study of the implementation shows that the concept of a single object neighborhood is able to efficiently scale the database with the objects in the area. The size of the database grows with the size of the grid and the objects covered by the location-based services. Typically, creating neighborhoods, computing distances between objects in the area, and running private information retrieval protocols causes the CPU to respond slowly with this increase in database size. In order to handle a large number of objects, we explore the concept of kernel and parallel computing in GPU. We develop GPU parallel implementation of the snapshot query to handle large number of objects. In our experiment, we exploit parameter tuning. The results show that with parameter tuning and parallel computing power of GPU we are able to significantly reduce the response time as the number of objects increases. To determine response time of an application without knowledge of the intricacies of GPU architecture, we extend our analysis to predict GPU execution time. We develop the run time equation for an operation and extrapolate the run time for a problem set based on the equation, and then we provide a model to predict GPU response time. As an alternative, the snapshot nearest neighbor query privacy problem can be addressed using secure hardware computing which can eliminate the need for protecting the rest of the sub-system, minimize resource usage and network transmission time. In this approach, a secure coprocessor is used to provide privacy. We process all information inside the coprocessor to deny adversaries access to any private information. To obfuscate access pattern to external memory location, we use oblivious random access memory methodology to access the server. Experimental evaluation shows that using a secure coprocessor reduces resource usage and query response time as the size of the coverage area and objects increases. Second, we address privacy concerns in the continuous nearest neighbor query model where location-based services automatically respond to a change in object*s location. In this model, we present solutions for two different types known as moving query static object and moving query moving object. For the solutions, we propose plane partition using a Voronoi diagram, and a continuous fractal space filling curve using a Hilbert curve order to create a continuous nearest neighbor relationship between the points of interest in a path. Specifically, space filling curve results in multi-dimensional to 1-dimensional object mapping where values are assigned to the objects based on proximity. To prevent subscribers from issuing a query each time there is a change in location and to reduce the response time, we introduce the concept of transition and update time to indicate where and when the nearest neighbor changes. We also introduce a database that dynamically scales with the size of the objects in a path to help obscure and relate objects. By executing the private information retrieval protocol twice on the data, the user secretly retrieves requested information from the database. The results of our experiment show that using plane partitioning and a fractal space filling curve to create nearest neighbor relationships with transition time between objects reduces the total response time

Security and Privacy for Big Data: A Systematic Literature Review

Big data is currently a hot research topic, with four million hits on Google scholar in October 2016. One reason for the popularity of big data research is the knowledge that can be extracted from analyzing these large data sets. However, data can contain sensitive information, and data must therefore be sufficiently protected as it is stored and processed. Furthermore, it might also be required to provide meaningful, proven, privacy guarantees if the data can be linked to individuals. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no systematic overview of the overlap between big data and the area of security and privacy. Consequently, this review aims to explore security and privacy research within big data, by outlining and providing structure to what research currently exists. Moreover, we investigate which papers connect security and privacy with big data, and which categories these papers cover. Ultimately, is security and privacy research for big data different from the rest of the research within the security and privacy domain? To answer these questions, we perform a systematic literature review (SLR), where we collect recent papers from top conferences, and categorize them in order to provide an overview of the security and privacy topics present within the context of big data. Within each category we also present a qualitative analysis of papers representative for that specific area. Furthermore, we explore and visualize the relationship between the categories. Thus, the objective of this review is to provide a snapshot of the current state of security and privacy research for big data, and to discover where further research is required