Privacy Protection System Research Articles

If these Canadians lived in the United States, how would they protect their privacy?

This paper contributes to the debate about the adequacy of the United States’ fragmented, networked, federal system of privacy protection, an outlier among modern industrialized Western democracies, by taking the perspective of an individual seeking redress for privacy invasions. We analyze five actual privacy cases from the Canadian private sector, investigated by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and examine whether the privacy “wrong” experienced by Canadian complainants would be illegal in the U.S., how an individual would proceed with a complaint and what the outcome might be. We attempt therefore to bring the debate away from the typically abstract institutional and legal approach to the level of the regime’s practical effectiveness. Despite well-documented flaws in the Canadian privacy protection system, from the point of view of the average citizen, it provides a more consistent, transparent, accessible and effective means for making privacy complaints and having them investigated and resolved, especially when the personal data is captured online.

Dual cooperative RFID‐telecare medicine information system authentication protocol for healthcare environments

AbstractRadio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology is used in a wide variety of applications, more recently as a leading identification technology in healthcare environments. In the most recent years, this technology has been adopted for telecare medicine information system (TMIS) for authentication, safety, security, data confidentiality, and patient's privacy protection over public networks. TMIS is the bridge between patients at home and doctors at healthcare organizations that permits to validate the correctness of exchanged information between different actors of the system. Recently, several RFID and smart cards authentication schemes have been presented and suggested for the TMIS in the literature. These schemes try to resolve the security and privacy problems over insecure healthcare network environments by exploiting different cryptographic primitive's solutions. In this paper, we first highlighted the vulnerabilities of the most recent proposed protocol for TMIS in the literature and proposed attacks based on the weaknesses related to the misuse of the timestamp technique, the calculation of the reader request and tag response messages using the one‐way hash function, which are not attentively scrutinized. Second, we propose an efficient dual RFID‐TMIS mobile authentication protocol with high efficiency and security for healthcare systems. Our proposal is an improvement and extension of the protocol of Li et al., where we propose to associate the RFID technology with TMIS in the same authentication system to take advantages of both these two promising technologies. The performance analysis shows that our improved protocol could solve security weaknesses of the studied protocol and provide mobility, efficiency and is well suited for TMIS adoption in remote areas and low population density. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Provably Secure Multi-server Privacy-Protection System Based on Chebyshev Chaotic Maps without Using Symmetric Cryptography

Most of the privacy-protection schemes adopting chaotic maps are usually by symmetric cryptography for guaranteeing identity hiding. This will lead to a high calculated amount. So, the paper will wipe out the symmetric cryptography, and only use chaotic maps, a secure one-way hash function to construct a provable privacy-protection system (PPS) which can achieve two kinds of privacy- protection and switch between them optionally by users: The first is anonymous scheme which can make nobody know the user's identity, including the server and the registration center (RC), and they only know these users are legal or paying members. The other is hiding scheme which owns also privacy-protection property, because the user's identity is not transferred during the process of the proposed protocol, and only the server and the RC know the user's identity. About practical environment, we adopt multi-server architecture which can allow the user to register at the RC once and can access all the permitted services provided by the eligible servers. Then a new PPS authenticated key agreement protocol is given based on chaotic maps. Security of the scheme is based on chaotic maps hard problems and a secure one way hash function. Compared with the related literatures recently, our proposed scheme can not only own high efficiency and unique functionality, but is also robust to various attacks and achieves perfect forward secrecy. Finally, we give the security proof and the efficiency analysis of our proposed scheme.

Supporting Business Privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the pervasive use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) within commercial environments, business privacy leakage due to the exposure of sensitive information transmitted in a WSN has become a major issue for enterprises. We examine business privacy protection in the application of WSNs. We propose a business privacy-protection system (BPS) that is modeled as a hierarchical profile in order to filter sensitive information with respect to enterprise-specified privacy requirements. The BPS aims at solving a tradeoff between metrics that are defined to estimate the utility of information and the business privacy risk. We design profile, risk assessment, and filtration agents to implement the BPS based on multiagent technology. The effectiveness of our proposed BPS is validated by experiments.

A provable privacy-protection system for multi-server environment

The paper firstly proposed a provable privacy-protection system (PPPS) which can achieve two kinds of privacy protection and switch between them optionally by users: The first is anonymous scheme which can make nobody know the users’ identity, including the server and the registration center (RC), and they only know these users are legal or paying members. The other is hiding identity scheme which owns also privacy-protection property, because the user’s identity is not transferred during the process of the proposed protocol, and only the server and the RC know the user’s identity. About practical environment, we adopt multi-server architecture which can allow the user to register at the RC once and can access all the permitted services provided by the eligible servers. Then a new PPPS authenticated key agreement protocol is given based on chaotic maps. Security of the scheme is based on chaotic maps hard problems, a secure one-way hash function and a secure symmetric cryptosystem. Compared with the related literatures recently, our proposed scheme can not only own high efficiency and unique functionality, but is also robust to various attacks and achieves perfect forward secrecy. Finally we give the security proof and the efficiency analysis of our proposed scheme.

Fingerprint Combinations for Privacy Protection: A Performance Analysis

Protecting the privacy of the fingerprint in authentication systems is become a major issue now-a-days because of the widespread use of fingerprint recognition systems. Traditional encryption and transformation techniques are shown to be more vulnerable to attacks. Therefore, fingerprint combination at the image and feature level has been proposed. This paper introduces two approaches for protecting fingerprint privacy by combining two different fingerprints into a new identity. This paper compares two systems that were introduced to protect the privacy of fingerprint. First is a novel system for fingerprint privacy protection by mixing features of two different fingerprints and thus generate a new identity. During enrolment, the system captures left and right thumb impression from a user. The new identity contains minutiae points of right thumb and has an orientation of left thumb impression. Second is a technique that combines minutiae features of two different fingerprints of a user. The minutiae points of each fingerprints is protected in the new identity. In addition minutiae filtering is done in order to remove spurious minutiae for improving the performance of both the systems. Finally the performance of each technique in terms of FRR, ERR and FAR is compared. For evaluating the performance of two techniques, this work uses same algorithms for the pre-processing and post-processing of fingerprint image.

A New Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Continuous Query in Location-Based Social Networking Services

With continuous queries that are used widely in location based mobile social networking services, how to protect the location privacy effectively for continuous query has been a hot topic for researchers. In this paper, we analyze the existing location privacy protection systems and algorithms for location based services; considering their disadvantages of slow responding time and high anonymization costs, we propose a new enhanced greedy cloaking algorithm which predicts a cloaking area at the initial query to be the cloaking region in the whole query lifetime by the comprehensive computation of privacy monitor, quality monitor, and dynamic adjuster. Privacy monitor and quality monitor charge the privacy protection level and service quality degree respectively; dynamic adjuster can adjust the cycle center point dynamically. We employ cycle as cloaking region form which can effectively alleviate the computation overhead. And we compare it with the earlier algorithm on three aspects. The experimental result shows that the enhanced greedy cloaking algorithm is better than the original greedy algorithm on average responding time or anonymization cost.

Optical Broadband Angular Selectivity

Light selection based purely on the angle of propagation is a long-standing scientific challenge. In angularly selective systems, however, the transmission of light usually also depends on the light frequency. We tailored the overlap of the band gaps of multiple one-dimensional photonic crystals, each with a different periodicity, in such a way as to preserve the characteristic Brewster modes across a broadband spectrum. We provide theory as well as an experimental realization with an all-visible spectrum, p-polarized angularly selective material system. Our method enables transparency throughout the visible spectrum at one angle--the generalized Brewster angle--and reflection at every other viewing angle.

PhoneProtector: Protecting User Privacy on the Android-Based Mobile Platform

With the popularity of Android platform based mobile phones, privacy protection of Android platform becomes a focus area. Now protection for Android based smart phone has many shortages, and also most phone protection systems are based on C/S model. In this paper, we propose a browser-free multilevel smart phone privacy protection system, which is based on the Android sensor platform. In this system, protection is ensured by means of SMS, which turns out to be easy, quick, and convenient. Users can send SMS to phones remotely as operating instructions; then the sensors on remote phones execute the instructions and return useful information. Second, the sensors based on the daemon process mechanism are used to prevent the sensors from being maliciously closed and uninstalled. Third, our system adopts SIM detecting mechanism to judge whether the SIM card is removed or changed. If exception is detected, the phone will be locked automatically by its inside sensors. The three points ensure full protection of phone privacy. Test results show that our system has good robustness and low resource consumption.

A Grey List-Based Privacy Protection for Android

The openness of Android OS and the easy development of applications have attracted a large number of enthusiasts to join in. Due to the deficiencies of permission mechanism of Android OS, an Android privacy protection system called Protectedroid is presented in this paper which is a model based on grey list and enables the design of security strategies more easily. Protectedroid adds an enforcing privacy protection module between App and private data. When an application is added to the grey list and intends to access sensitive data and resources, Protectedroid will intercept data access request and return false objects for the grey applications. Experimental results show that: Protectedroid can effectively throttle the privacy leakage and ensure the effectiveness and stability of the entire system.

Privacy protection method for fine-grained urban traffic modeling using mobile sensors

With the ubiquitous nature of mobile sensing technologies, privacy issues are becoming increasingly important, and need to be carefully addressed. Data needs for transportation modeling and privacy protection should be deliberately balanced for different applications. This paper focuses on developing privacy mechanisms that would simultaneously satisfy privacy protection and data needs for fine-grained urban traffic modeling applications using mobile sensors. To accomplish this, a virtual trip lines (VTLs) zone-based system and related filtering approaches are developed. Traffic-knowledge-based adversary models are proposed and tested to evaluate the effectiveness of such a privacy protection system by making privacy attacks. The results show that in addition to ensuring an acceptable level of privacy, the released datasets from the privacy-enhancing system can also be applied to urban traffic modeling with satisfactory results. Albeit application-specific, such a “Privacy-by-Design” approach would hopefully shed some light on other transportation applications using mobile sensors.

A new triage model conforming to the needs of selective search and seizure of electronic evidence

Recently, digital evidence has been playing an increasingly important role in criminal cases. The seizure of Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and creation of images of entire disk drives have become a best practice by law enforcement agencies. In most criminal cases, however, the incriminatory information found on an HDD is only a small portion of the entire HDD and the remaining information is not relevant to the case. For this reason, demands for the regulation of excessive search and seizure of defendants' innocuous information have been increasing and gaining strength. Some courts have even ruled out inadmissible digital evidence gathered from sites where the scope of a warrant has been exceeded, considering it to be a violation of due process. In order to protect the privacy of suspects, a standard should be made restricting excessive search and seizure. There are, however, many difficulties in selectively identifying and collecting digital evidence at a crime scene, and it is not realistic to expect law enforcement officers to search and collect completely only case-relevant evidence. Too much restriction can cause severe problems in investigations and may result in law enforcement authorities missing crucial evidence. Therefore, a model needs to be established that can assess and regulate excessive search and seizure of digital evidence in accordance with a reasonable standard that considers practical limitations.Consequently, we propose a new approach that balances two conflicting values: human rights protection versus the achievement of effective investigations. In this new approach, a triage model is derived from an assessment of the limiting factors of on-site search and seizure. For the assessment, a survey that provides information about the level of law enforcement, such as the available labor, equipment supply, technical limitations, and time constraints, was conducted using current field officers. A triage model that can meet the legal system's demand for privacy protection and which supports decision making by field officers that can have legal effects was implemented. Since the demands of each legal system and situation of law enforcement vary from country to country, the triage model should be established individually for each legal system. Along with experiment of our proposed approach, this paper presents a new triage model that is designed to meet the recent requirements of the Korean legal system for privacy protection from, specifically, a Korean perspective.

Privacy policy-driven mashups

Mashups is novel content created by extracting and combining data from diverse data sources. In this paper, we present a framework of privacy-preserving data sharing and integration for mashup services. The mashup privacy protection system evaluates privacy preferences expressed in a distributed privacy policy network, i.e., personal privacy policies (PPP), data source organisation’s privacy policies (SPP) and mashup organisation’s privacy policies (MPP). The privacy policy is expressed in terms of sensitive data to be protected, mashup provider, mashup-operations, and purposes. These parameters can link to the open semantic resources on the web, such as a friend of a friend (FOAF), service industry classification codes and UN product and service classification codes, providing richer semantic reference and avoiding data ambiguity. The mashup privacy protection system allows the specification of privacy policies and enforces distributed privacy policies in creating a new content by a third party mashup provider.

A Secure Dynamic Identity Based Remote User Authentication Scheme Using Secret Sharing

With the rapid growth of Internet based applications, strong privacy protection and robust system security have become essential requirements for an authentication scheme. Engineers have proposed many identity based authentication schemes for remote login systems in past decades. In recent years, the security mechanism for the dynamic identity of legal user appearance has become a new technology in the field of network communications. This novel technology has allowed us to conduct a more secure remote user authentication scheme using a smart card, in which the well-designed module has remedied the system drawback of a static identity based authentication scheme. However, many kinds of authentication schemes need a system of synchronized clocks to withstand replay attacks and achieve mutual authentication, and most of them cannot propose a lightweight mechanism to reduce implementation complexity and achieve computation efficiency. Therefore, we propose a new dynamic identity based authentication scheme using three-way challenge-response strategy to achieve mutual authentication without a system of synchronized clocks. It completely prevents various attacks, supports the session key agreement, and offers the functionality advantages. As a result, the proposed scheme seems to be more secure and suitable for remote communication environment with low computation consumption and better security attributes.

Developing Designs of Information Leakage Prevention System for Personal Information and Privacy Protection

Developing Designs of Information Leakage Prevention System for Personal Information and Privacy Protection

Privacy protection system and metrics for hiding electrical events

Smart grid privacy concerns the privacy of information extracted by analysing smart metering data. We present ElecPrivacy: a home electrical power management system that uses a rechargeable battery to mask home energy load signatures and, effectively, protect the privacy of appliance usage information. ElecPrivacy can be studied in the context of the classic communications problem, where input data is passed through a communication channel that distorts it. In this paper, we define and measure how the appearance of ElecPrivacy events can be estimated, or, reversely, how well the secrecy of this data is protected. In particular, we develop a range of privacy metrics by combining clustering, information theoretic (K-divergence), correlation and regression techniques, and testing over a large data set obtained from real home measurements.

Two robust remote user authentication protocols using smart cards

With the rapid growth of electronic commerce and enormous demand from variants of Internet based applications, strong privacy protection and robust system security have become essential requirements for an authentication scheme or universal access control mechanism. In order to reduce implementation complexity and achieve computation efficiency, design issues for efficient and secure password based remote user authentication scheme have been extensively investigated by research community in these two decades. Recently, two well-designed password based authentication schemes using smart cards are introduced by Hsiang and Shih (2009) and Wang et al. (2009), respectively. Hsiang et al. proposed a static ID based authentication protocol and Wang et al. presented a dynamic ID based authentication scheme. The authors of both schemes claimed that their protocol delivers important security features and system functionalities, such as mutual authentication, data security, no verification table implementation, freedom on password selection, resistance against ID-theft attack, replay attack and insider attack, as well as computation efficiency. However, these two schemes still have much space for security enhancement. In this paper, we first demonstrate a series of vulnerabilities on these two schemes. Then, two enhanced protocols with corresponding remedies are proposed to eliminate all identified security flaws in both schemes.

Sport safety improvement using security camera without audience privacy violation

Crime in the sport stadium is an unacceptable situation. It is necessary to watch and inform to the related person. The existed system to date is not replied such a requirement. In this paper, we propose the use of today information technology for crime in watching and investigation in the sport stadium. The system known as wireless-touch screen that uses for sport stadium surveillance, detection, and prevention criminality. It is cheap and movable instrument which is suitable for portable application. The additional system for privacy protection using the camera with angle sensor and spectator's information is also proposed.

Obligations of trust for privacy and confidentiality in distributed transactions

PurposeThis paper aims to describe a bilateral symmetric approach to authorization, privacy protection and obligation enforcement in distributed transactions. The authors introduce the concept of the obligation of trust (OoT) protocol as a privacy assurance and authorization mechanism that is built upon the XACML standard. The OoT allows two communicating parties to dynamically exchange their privacy and authorization requirements and capabilities, which the authors term a notification of obligation (NoB), as well as their commitments to fulfilling each other's requirements, which the authors term signed acceptance of obligations (SAO). The authors seek to describe some applicability of these concepts and to show how they can be integrated into distributed authorization systems for stricter privacy and confidentiality control.Design/methodology/approachExisting access control and privacy protection systems are typically unilateral and provider‐centric, in that the enterprise service provider assigns the access rights, makes the access control decisions, and determines the privacy policy. There is no negotiation between the client and the service provider about which access control or privacy policy to use. The authors adopt a symmetric, more user‐centric approach to privacy protection and authorization, which treats the client and service provider as peers, in which both can stipulate their requirements and capabilities, and hence negotiate terms which are equally acceptable to both parties.FindingsThe authors demonstrate how the obligation of trust protocol can be used in a number of different scenarios to improve upon the mechanisms that are currently available today.Practical implicationsThis approach will serve to increase trust in distributed transactions since each communicating party receives a difficult to repudiate digitally signed acceptance of obligations, in a standard language (XACML), which can be automatically enforced by their respective computing machinery.Originality/valueThe paper adds to current research in trust negotiation, privacy protection and authorization by combining all three together into one set of standardized protocols. Furthermore, by providing hard to repudiate signed acceptance of obligations messages, this strengthens the legal case of the injured party should a dispute arise.

Protocols that hide user’s preferences in electronic transactions

The Internet creates many new threats to personal privacy and raises some unique privacy concerns. In this paper we study the problem of how to protect users’ privacy in web transactions of digital products. In particular, we introduce a system which (1) allows a user to disclose his/her identity information (such as user account or credit card number) to a web site in exchange for a digital product, but (2) prevents the web site from learning which specific product the user intends to obtain. The problem concerned here is orthogonal to the problem of anonymous transactions [M. Reed, P. Syverson, D. Goldschag, Anonymous connections and Onion Routing, IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication 16 (4) (1998) 482–494; M. Reiter, A. Rubin, Crowds: anonymity for web transactions, ACM Transactions on Information System Security, 1 (1) (1998) 66–92] but commensurate with the general problem of PIR (private information retrieval) [B. Chor, O. Goldreich, E. Kushilevita, M. Sudan, Private information retrieval, in: Proceedings of 36th FOCS, 1995, pp. 41–50; B. Chor, N. Gilboa, Computational private information retrieval, in: Proceedings of 29th STOC, 1997, pp. 304–313]. Most of the existing results in PIR, however, are theoretical in nature and can not be applied in practice due to their huge communication and computational overheads. In the present paper, we introduce two practical solutions that satisfy the above two requirements and analyze their security and performance. Another issue we study in this paper is how to recover sales statistics data in our user privacy-protected system. We present a novel solution to the problem along with its security analysis.