Privacy Protection Solutions Research Articles

HilAnchor: Location Privacy Protection in the Presence of Users’ Preferences

Location privacy receives considerable attentions in emerging location based services. Most current practices however either ignore users’ preferences or incompletely fulfill privacy preferences. In this paper, we propose a privacy protection solution to allow users' preferences in the fundamental query of k nearest neighbors (kNN). Particularly, users are permitted to choose privacy preferences by specifying minimum inferred region. Via Hilbert curve based transformation, the additional workload from users' preferences is alleviated. Furthermore, this transformation reduces time-expensive region queries in 2-D space to range the ones in 1-D space. Therefore, the time efficiency, as well as communication efficiency, is greatly improved due to clustering properties of Hilbert curve. Further, details of choosing anchor points are theoretically elaborated. The empirical studies demonstrate that our implementation delivers both flexibility for users’ preferences and scalability for time and communication costs.

$P^{2}$: Privacy-Preserving Communication and Precise Reward Architecture for V2G Networks in Smart Grid

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks are important components of the smart grid (SG) for their capability of providing better ancillary services and facilitating the adoption of renewable resources. The operation of the V2G networks is based on continuously monitoring the status of individual battery vehicle (BV) as well as a carefully designed incentive scheme to attract sufficient participating BVs. However, the close monitoring tends to raise privacy concerns from the BV owners about identity and location information leakage, which have not been considered in previous works. In this paper, we make the first attempt to identify the privacy-preserving issues and propose a precise reward scheme in V2G networks, both of which are important towards bringing the concept of V2G network into practice. In V2G networks, it is the service providers (individual BVs) who need privacy protection rather than the service consumer (power grid). This unique characteristic renders privacy protection solutions proposed for conventional network systems not directly applicable. To protect privacy of BVs in V2G networks, we present , a secure communication architecture which achieves privacy-preserving for both BVs' monitoring and rewarding processes. Extensive performance analysis shows that only incurs moderate communication and computational overheads.

Anonymous User Communication for Privacy Protection in Wireless Metropolitan Mesh Networks

As a combination of ad hoc networks and wireless local area network (WLAN), the wireless mesh network (WMN) provides a low-cost convenient solution to the last-mile network-connectivity problem. As such, existing route protocols designed to provide security and privacy protection for ad hoc networks are no longer applicable in WMNs. On the other hand, little research has focused on privacy-preserving routing for WMNs. In this paper, we propose two solutions for security and privacy protection in WMNs. The first scheme relies on group signatures, together with user credentials, to deliver security and privacy protection. By enforcing access control using user credentials, the user's identity has to be disclosed to mesh routers. To avoid this, our second scheme employs pairwise secrets between any two users to achieve stronger privacy protection. In the second scheme, the user is kept anonymous to mesh routers. Finally, we analyze these two schemes in terms of security, privacy, and performance.

A Low Cost Key Agreement Protocol Based on Binary Tree for EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 RFID Protocol

There are many protocols proposed for protecting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system privacy and security. A number of these protocols are designed for protecting long-term security of RFID system using symmetric key or public key cryptosystem. Others are designed for protecting user anonymity and privacy. In practice, the use of RFID technology often has a short lifespan, such as commodity check out, supply chain management and so on. Furthermore, we know that designing a long-term security architecture to protect the security and privacy of RFID tags information requires a thorough consideration from many different aspects. However, any security enhancement on RFID technology will jack up its cost which may be detrimental to its widespread deployment. Due to the severe constraints of RFID tag resources (e.g., power source, computing power, communication bandwidth) and open air communication nature of RFID usage, it is a great challenge to secure a typical RFID system. For example, computational heavy public key and symmetric key cryptography algorithms (e.g., RSA and AES) may not be suitable or over-killed to protect RFID security or privacy. These factors motivate us to research an efficient and cost effective solution for RFID security and privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a new effective generic binary tree based key agreement protocol (called BKAP) and its variations, and show how it can be applied to secure the low cost and resource constraint RFID system. This BKAP is not a general purpose key agreement protocol rather it is a special purpose protocol to protect privacy, un-traceability and anonymity in a single RFID closed system domain.

Current and future privacy enhancing technologies for the internet

This paper presents an overview of the current and next solutions for privacy protection on the Internet. We highlight five categories of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (Pets). First, we introduce the multiple virtual identities that can represent a person, and the way the person can manage them. Then, we focus on the untraceability problem, which has been a major field of research since the very first papers on privacy protection in the early eighties. Anonymous access to services will be the central point of the third category of pets we consider. To complete this overview, we describe the current and future authorization pets, and finish by a presentation of personal data management. For each of these categories we present some of the current technologies and the most promising ones under development.

Cryptographic solutions for user privacy protection in transactions of digital products

Cryptographic solutions for user privacy protection in transactions of digital products

Privacy Protection for HealthGrid Applications

This contribution aims at introducing the problem of privacy protection in e-Health and at describing a number of existing privacy enhancing techniques (PETs). The recognition that privacy constitutes a fundamental right is gradually entering public awareness. Because healthcare-related data are susceptible to being abused for many obvious reasons, public apprehension about privacy has focused on medical data. Public authorities have become convinced of the need to enforce privacy protection and make considerable efforts for promoting through privacy protection legislation the deployment of PETs. Based on the study of the specific features of Grid technology, ways in which PET services could be integrated in the HealthGrid are being analyzed. Grid technology aims at removing barriers between local and remote resources. The privacy and legal issues raised by the HealthGrid are caused by the transparent interchange and processing of sensitive medical information. PET technology has already proven its usefulness for privacy protection in health-related marketing and research data collection. While this paper does not describe market-ready solutions for privacy protection in the HealthGrid, it puts forward several cases in which the Grid may benefit from PETs. Early integration of privacy protection services into the HealthGrid can lead to a synergy that is beneficial for the development of the HealthGrid itself.