Selected Solutions for Preserving Users' Privacy in an Increasingly Networked World
Delphine Christin (Uni Bonn)
Thursday, 26 June 2014, 15:00, b-it 1.25 (cosec meeting room)
The presence of multimodal sensors on current mobile phones enables a broad range of novel mobile applications. Environmental and user-centric sensor data of unprecedented quantity and quality can be captured and reported by a possible user base of billions of mobile phone subscribers worldwide. The strong focus on the collection of detailed sensor data may however compromise user privacy in various regards, e.g., by tracking a user's current location. In this talk, I will outline different privacy-preserving solutions we developed at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. In particular, I will present IncogniSense, an anonymity-preserving reputation framework tailored for participatory sensing applications. Our system utilizes periodic pseudonyms generated using blind signature and relies on reputation transfer between these pseudonyms. The reputation transfer process has an inherent trade-off between anonymity protection and loss in reputation. We investigate by means of extensive simulations several reputation cloaking schemes that address this tradeoff in different ways. A prototype implementation demonstrates that the associated overheads are minimal.