Opportunistic mobile social networks: architecture, privacy, security issues and future directions

Mobile Social Networks and its related applications have made a very great impact in the society. Many new technologies related to mobile social networking are booming rapidly now-a-days and yet to boom. One such upcoming technology is Opportunistic Mobile Social Networking. This technology allows mobile users to communicate and exchange data with each other without the use of Internet. This paper is about Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks, its architecture, issues and some future research directions. The architecture and issues of Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks are compared with that of traditional Mobile Social Networks. The main contribution of this paper is regarding privacy and security issues in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks. Finally, some future research directions in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks have been elaborated regarding the data's privacy and security

ePRIVO: an enhanced PRIvacy-preserVing opportunistic routing protocol for vehicular delay-tolerant networks

This article proposes an enhanced PRIvacy preserVing Opportunistic routing protocol (ePRIVO) for Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks (VDTN). ePRIVO models a VDTN as a time-varying neighboring graph where edges correspond to neighboring relationship between pairs of vehicles. It addresses the problem of vehicles taking routing decision meanwhile keeping their information private, i.e, vehicles compute their similarity and/or compare their routing metrics in a private manner using the Paillier homomorphic encryption scheme. The effectiveness of ePRIVO is supported through extensive simulations with synthetic mobility models and a real mobility trace. Simulation results show that ePRIVO presents on average very low cryptographic costs in most scenarios. Additionally, ePRIVO presents on average gains of approximately 29% and 238% in terms of delivery ratio for the real and synthetic scenarios considered compared to other privacy-preserving routing protocols

A mobile code bundle extension for application-defined routing in delay and disruption tolerant networking

Grup de recerca SENDA (Security of Network and Distributed Applications)In this paper, we introduce software code to improve Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) performance. DTN is extremely useful when source and destination nodes are intermittently connected. DTN implementations use application-specific routing algorithms to overcome those limitations. However, current implementations do not support the concurrent execution of several routing algorithms. In this paper, we contribute to this issue providing a solution that consists on extending the messages being communicated by incorporating software code for forwarding, lifetime control and prioritisation purposes. Our proposal stems from the idea of moving the routing algorithms from the host to the message. This solution is compatible with Bundle Protocol (BP) and facilitates the deployment of applications with new routing needs. A real case study based on an emergency scenario is presented to provide details of a real implementation. Several simulations are presented to prove the feasibility and usability of the system and to analyse its performance in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches

Special Section on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications

It is our great pleasure to introduce this Special Section of the Journal, focused on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications. We strongly believe autonomic and opportunistic properties will be a key feature of the Future Mobile Internet. The huge proliferation of mobile devices with wireless networking capabilities makes it possible to foresee a Future Internet environment in which users\u27 mobile devices will spontaneously network together and build self-organizing wireless networks for enabling users interaction and content exchange. This will be a natural enabler for the take off of User Generated Content and other user-centred networking models in the area of pervasive mobile networks

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications

Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page

Mobile Databases: a Selection of Open Issues and Research Directions

International audienceThis paper reports on the main results of a specific action on mobile databases conducted by CNRS in France from October 2001 to December 2002. The objective of this action was to review the state of progress in mobile databases and identify major research directions for the French database community. Rather than provide a survey of all important issues in mobile databases, this paper gives an outline of the directions in which the action participants are now engaged, namely: copy synchronization in disconnected computing, mobile transactions, database embedded in ultra-light devices, data confidentiality, P2P dissemination models and middleware adaptability

Security and Routing in a Disconnected Delay Tolerant Network

Providing internet access in disaster-affected areas where there is little to no internet connectivity is extremely difficult. This paper proposes an architecture that utilizes existing hardware and mobile applications to enable users to access the Internet while maintaining a high level of security. The system comprises a client application, a transport application, and a server running on the cloud. The client combines data from all supported applications into a single bundle, which is encrypted using an end-to-end encryption technique and sent to the transport. The transport physically moves the bundles to a connected area and forwards them to the server. The server decrypts the bundles and forwards them to the respective application servers. The result is then returned to the original client application via the network of transports used previously. This solution provides a convenient way to establish connectivity in disconnected areas without additional hardware and can accommodate various application data. Furthermore, it ensures data integrity, confidentiality, and authentication by encrypting and validating the data during transmission

A PEFKS- and CP-ABE-Based Distributed Security Scheme in Interest-Centric Opportunistic Networks

Security is a crucial issue in distributed applications of multihop wireless opportunistic network due to the features of exposed on the fly communication, relaxed end-to-end connectivity, and vague destinations literately. In this paper, we focus on problems of user privacy leakage and end-to-end confidentiality invasion in content-based or interest-centric wireless opportunistic network. And we propose a public-encryption-with-fuzzy-keyword-search- (PEFKS-) and ciphertext-policy-attribute-based-encryption- (CP-ABE-) based distributed security scheme by refining and compromising two-pairing-based encryption, searchable encryption, and attribute-based encryption. Our scheme enables opportunistic forwarding according to fuzzy interests preserving full privacy of users and ensures end-to-end confidentiality with a fine-grained access control strategy in an interest-centric scenario of large-scale wireless opportunistic networks. Finally, we analyze and evaluate the scheme in terms of security and performance