Design and Implementation of S-MARKS: A Secure Middleware for Pervasive Computing Applications

As portable devices have become a part of our everyday life, more people are unknowingly participating in a pervasive computing environment. People engage with not a single device for a specific purpose but many devices interacting with each other in the course of ordinary activity. With such prevalence of pervasive technology, the interaction between portable devices needs to be continuous and imperceptible to device users. Pervasive computing requires a small, scalable and robust network which relies heavily on the middleware to resolve communication and security issues. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of S-MARKS which incorporates device validation, resource discovery and a privacy module

Privometer: Privacy protection in social networks

The increasing popularity of social networks, such as Facebook and Orkut, has raised several privacy concerns. Traditional ways of safeguarding privacy of personal information by hiding sensitive attributes are no longer adequate. Research shows that probabilistic classification techniques can effectively infer such private information. The disclosed sensitive information of friends, group affiliations and even participation in activities, such as tagging and commenting, are considered background knowledge in this process. In this paper, we present a privacy protection tool, called Privometer, that measures the amount of sensitive information leakage in a user profile and suggests selfsanitization actions to regulate the amount of leakage. In contrast to previous research, where inference techniques use publicly available profile information, we consider an augmented model where a potentially malicious application installed in the user’s friend profiles can access substantially more information. In our model, merely hiding the sensitive information is not sufficient to protect the user privacy. We present an implementation of Privometer in Facebook

Towards privacy protection in pervasive healthcare

Proliferation of small handheld devices and wireless technologies has kindled the phenomenon of pervasive computing. Healthcare, being a prime concern for every society, has been considered as an ideal setting for deployment of this technology. Pervasive healthcare aims to improve patient independent living and quality of life and pay special attention to issues of security, privacy, transparency and ease of use. From its very nature of being open and dynamic, the pervasive environment has been challenged with security and privacy related issues with regards to collaborative information sharing. In this paper, we present some of the privacy challenges that arise when designing pervasive healthcare environments and discuss addressing some of these issues in a home based patient monitoring system. Specifically, we cover privacy violation through individual healthcare information availability and information leakage through context-aware services. Keywords-Privacy violation; Information leakage; Healthcare; Pervasive Computing

A Novel Approach to Attack-Resistant Privacy Preservation for Location-Based Services

With the proliferation of mobile handheld devices and widespread deployment of wireless technologies, Location-based Services have become an integral part of our day to day life. The easy availability of these services enables people to locate special points of interests such as restaurants, shopping malls in map on their handheld devices. Yet, the increasing popularity is marred by the privacy threat arising from the usage. The threat stems from the disclosure of location information by the request issuer when he or she submits the Location based Query to the service provider. The adversary with ill intent may be able to correlate the information obtained from a query with the help of additional external information such as publicly available directories (WhitePages) and thus obtain a location trace of the individuals. Therefore, the goal of the research is to protect the privacy of such Location based Query in such a way that it thwarts any re-identification attempt by the adversary and presents the query result I in an efficient manner, considering the resource constraints of the handheld devices. In this thesis, we examine and address the privacy threats arising from the usage of the Location-based Services that use a Location Anonymizer (in order to cloak or obfuscate the location information of the user with several other users\u27 locations). While the existing privacy protection mechanisms in the literature succumb to attacks by the adversary, our proposed approach happens to be attack resistant and at the same time demonstrates efficiency in terms of optimizing the candidate result set. The experimental evaluation provides comparative analysis among different privacy protection mechanisms and proves the claim that our approach is efficient and very appropriate for the mobile environment compared to other approaches

FPCS: A Formal Approach for Privacy-aware Context-based Services

The emergence of new technologies and the proliferation of mobile and handheld devices have facilitated development of context-based services. Common examples include the location based services. However, the revelation of the context and static information gives rise to new and very complex privacy concerns in such services. In this paper, we propose a formal model to regulate the privacy level of information passed to the service provider without disrupting the quality of information required for service access. The framework takes on two forms based on the receiver of the request generalization task to a trusted party or local device. A formal attack model assumes different levels of knowledge by the attacker and demonstrates the relative concerns of static information over contexts

Avoiding Privacy Violation for Resource Sharing in Ad hoc Networks of Pervasive Computing Environment

Users of handheld devices may want to share services resources with each other in pervasive computing environment. Availability of information regarding users may lead to privacy violations while communicating with others for services and resources. Providing a model to resolve this issue in centralized or distributed environment is not desirable or not feasible if we really want to achieve ubiquity. In this paper, we present a privacy aware model for resource sharing in pervasive computing environment with an illustrative example. Our model exploits the concepts of policies and ordered binary decision diagrams

WiFi Radar: Design and Implementation of an Infrastructure-less Location Tracking System for Pervasive Environment

We design and implement a low cost, easy to deploy and lightweight location tracking solution that operates without the need for a fixed infrastructure. We call it WiFi radar, which uses the signal strength of radio transmissions to determine the position (distance and direction) of devices with near linear approximation. Notwithstanding the challenges that radio frequency signals pose for location determination, the accuracy and precision of our system is relatively high. Our application is user-friendly, customizable and shows graphical as well as list views of the located objects. To the best of our knowledge, our system is the first endeavor that implements a location tracking system without the use of any fixed infrastructure and it may be the cheapest solution built so far

Smart Tracker: Light Weight Infrastructure-less Assets Tracking solution for Ubiquitous Computing Environment

From container terminals, healthcare services, libraries to household, the role of Asset Tracking Applications has become indispensable. As the organizations grow, so do their volume of assets, soon it becomes very cumbersome to track these assets in real time and accurately prepare a financial report to avoid overbuys. Rapid development of Wireless Area Network and Radio Frequency transmitting active and passive devices like RFID tags have bolstered the deployment of Wireless Asset Tracking applications in all these disciplines. But apart from organizations where costly network infrastructures are in place to support such a reliable asset tracking task, the areas like ports, warehouses, truck stops, parks, mines, rescue spots still suffer from appropriate solutions that can cope with the adverse scenario of being devoid of infrastructure. Even high end Location Based Systems (LBS) like GPS are not scaled well in such situations. To meet these challenges, our approach presents a common platform that can locate different active and passive RF transmitting objects over the range of distances on small handheld devices. To effectively utilize the resources of the constrained handheld devices like PDA and cell phones, a light weight algorithm has been used. Our approach follows an extensible and modular architecture which offers applications from different platforms to customize and extend their functionalities. Smart Tracker has been implemented and evaluated with PDAs, RFID tags, WiFi sources for both indoor and outdoor applications