Privacy-preserving Transactions on the Web

There is a rapid growth in the number of applications using sensitive and personal information on the World Wide Web. This growth creates an urgent need to maintain the anonymity of the participants in many web transactions and to preserve the privacy of their sensitive data during data dissemination over the web. First, maintaining the anonymity of users on the World Wide Web is essential for a number of web applications. Anonymity cannot be assured by single interested individuals or an organization but requires participation from other web nodes owned by other entities. Second, preserving the privacy of sensitive data is another very important issue in web transactions. Today, exchanging and sharing personal data between various participants in web transactions endangers privacy. In this article, we discuss various research directions and challenges that need to be addressed while trying to accomplish our goal of maintaining the anonymity of participants and preserving the privacy of sensitive data in web transactions. To maintain anonymity of participants in a web transaction, we propose a method based on the modi fied form of the club mechanism with economic incentives, a solution which rests upon the Prisoner’s Dilemma approach. We compare our approach to other well-known dat a-sharing approaches such as Crowds, Tor, Tarzan and LPWA. To maintain the privacy of sensitive data, we propose a solution based on privacy-preserving data dissemination (P2D2). We also present a solution to implement our approach using Semantic Web Rule Languages and Jena—a Java-based inference engine

The Active Bundle Scheme for Protecting Electronic Medical Records

Adoption of the electronic medical records (EMRs) or electronic health records (EHRs) by healthcare providers will improve the quality of the American healthcare and reduce the annual bill. However, it will also increase privacy threats due to easier dissemination of EMRs/EHRs than “paper” medical records. Current privacy protection solutions for patient EMRs/EHRs have two main limitations: (1) they require an extensive exchange of messages between computer systems of healthcare providers; and (2) they depend only on data encryption. In this position paper, we propose a solution that provides protection for the patients\u27 EMRs/EHRs disseminated among different authorized healthcare provider systems. This is achieved through the use of the construct named active bundles (ABs). ABs keep EMRs/EHRs as sensitive data, include metadata containing privacy policies, and encompass a virtual machine that enforces privacy policies

Impact of initial target position on performance of UAV surveillance using opportunistic resource utilization networks

We propose application of Opportunistic Resource Utilization Networks (Oppnets), a novel type of Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANETs), for ad hoc networking of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in surveillance missions. Oppnets provide effective resource virtualization and adaption to highly dynamic and unstable nature of MANETs. They can be viewed as middleware to facilitate building flexible and adaptive distributed systems that provide all kinds of resources or services to the requesting application via the so called helper mechanism. The simulation study focuses on the impact of an initial target position on the performance of Oppnet-based UAV surveillance systems. We find that detection success ratios and time to detect a target are negligibly affected by the initial target position in the surveillance area when UAVs expand up their Oppnet quickly, but strongly affected by the initial target position when UAVs are slow in building up their Oppnet

A simulation study of ad hoc networking of UAVs with opportunistic resource utilization networks

Specialized ad hoc networks of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been playing increasingly important roles in applications for homeland defense and security. Common resource virtualization techniques are mainly designed for stable networks; they fall short in providing optimal performance in more dynamic networks such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs)-due to their highly dynamic and unstable nature. We propose application of Opportunistic Resource Utilization Networks (Oppnets), a novel type of MANETs, for UAV ad hoc networking. Oppnets provide middleware to facilitate building flexible and adaptive distributed systems that provide all kinds of resources or services to the requesting application via a helper mechanism. We simulated a homeland defense use case for Oppnets that involves detecting a suspicious watercraft. Our simulation compares performance of an Oppnet with a baseline case in which no Oppnet is used. The simulation results show that Oppnets are a promising framework for high-performance ad hoc UAV networking. They provide excellent performance even under imperfect (and realistic) conditions, such as a less invasive use of helpers, denial of help by some of the candidate helpers, and imperfect detection capabilities of Oppnet components