Context Sensitive Privacy Management in a Distributed Environment

2000

Satisfying the varied privacy preferences of individuals, while exposing context data to authorized applications and individuals, remains a major challenge for context-aware computing. This paper describes our experiences in building a middleware component, the Context Privacy Engine (CPE), that enforces a role-based, context-dependent privacy model for enterprise domains. While fundamentally an ACL-based access control scheme, CPE extends the traditional ACL mechanism with usage control and context constraints. This paper focuses on discussing issues related to managing and evaluating contextdependent privacy policies. Extensive experimental studies with a production-grade implementation and real-life context sources demonstrate that the CPE can support a large number of concurrent requests. The experiments also show valuable insight on how context-retrieval can affect the privacy evaluation process.

2000

Privacy is recognized as a fundamental issue for the provi- sion of context-aware services. In this paper we present work in progress regarding the deflnition of a comprehensive framework for supporting context-aware services while protecting users' privacy. Our proposal is based on a combination of mechanisms for enforcing context-aware pri- vacy policies and k-anonymity. Moreover, our proposed technique in- volves

Computer Networks, 2007

Proceedings of the 5th WSEAS …, 2006

Pervasive environments pose extended security and privacy threads if compared with traditional systems. Many privacy enhancing and trust management techniques have been studied in recent years. In the paper we present the DAIDALOS IST FP6 Integrated Project[1] approach to enabling privacy in pervasive information systems. In DAIDALOS privacy enabling is approached in a systemic and manageable fashion. To enable privacy we use a fusion of techniques that bring together various technologies and research disciplines from the field of privacy engineering: automatic agent negotiation, identity management, and trust management. As a solution to the complex problems imposed by pervasive environments we propose privacy enabling architecture of the DAIDALOS platform. Privacy enabling solutions are in service to user communication and exploit the system feedback loop where experience gained in one communication cycle is fed back via updating of the reputation models. Entities involved in communication first have to negotiate privacy agreements based upon trustworthiness, afterwards appropriate virtual identities are created or selected and in the last phase privacy agreements violations are considered and trustworthiness of the communicating entities are lowered.

2008

Privacy is recognized as a fundamental issue for the provision of context-aware services. In this paper we present work in progress regarding the definition of a comprehensive framework for supporting context-aware services while protecting users' privacy. Our proposal is based on a combination of mechanisms for enforcing context-aware privacy policies and k -anonymity. Moreover, our proposed technique involves the use of stereotypes for generalizing precise identity information to the aim of protecting users' privacy.

2016

A system in ubiquitous computing consists of a large amount of heterogeneous users and devices that communicate with each other. Users in this dynamic field communicate with lightweight and autonomous devices, which accentuate security problems and make them more complex. The existing mechanisms and solutions are inadequate to address new challenges mainly for problems of authentication and protection of privacy. In this paper, a new security architecture called Tree Based distributed Privacy Protection System is proposed. It supports protection of users private data and addresses the shortcomings of systems like GAIA, OpenID and User-directed Privacy Protection (UPP). Furthermore, it takes into account the domain dissociation property, in order to achieve decentralized data protection. Keywords–Ubiquitous Computing; Security; Private Data Protection; Privacy; Integrity.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

In this paper we address the realization of personal privacy control in pervasive computing. We argue that personal privacy demands differ substantially from those assumed in enterprise privacy control. This is demonstrated by introducing seven requirements specific for personal privacy, which are then used for the definition of our privacy policy language, called SenTry. It is designed to take into account the expected level of privacy from the perspective of the individual when interacting with context-aware services. SenTry serves as the base for implementing personal privacy in our User-centric Privacy Framework for pervasive computing.

Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl., 2021

The development of advanced technologies in cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data processing, and 5G enables service providers to efficiently and effectively process diverse and massive data and in turn provide users with more diversified and personalized services. However, in the process of data collection and processing, a large number of private data such as a user's identity, a user's location at different times, and even a user's personal medical/financial information is often required. More and more people are concerned about the issue of the privacy disclosure of their own data. In order to solve this problem, the concept of privacy-preserving computing has been proposed and become an important research hotspot gradually. However, there is a contradiction between the utility of data and privacy preservation. How to address this contradiction and to achieve an effective compromise between the two aspects

Information & Software Technology, 2009

Privacy and data protection are pivotal issues in the nowadays society. They concern the right to prevent dissemination of sensitive or confidential information of individuals. Many studies have been proposed on this topic from various perspectives, namely sociological, economic, legal, and technological. We have recognized the legal perspective as being the basis of all other perspectives. Actually, data protection regulations set the legal principles and requirements that must be met by organizations when processing personal data. The objective of this work is to provide a reference base for the development of methodologies tailored to design privacy-aware systems to be compliant with data protection regulations.

Design, Implementation, and Emergent Applications

Mobile applications are being used in every field of life. Latest advances in mobile computing technology and applications make it a new level of communication proxy for its users. Despite their power as personalized service provider and an internet connected computing device, mobile systems have their inherent limitations, like small display area and limited power and memory, which must be handled in mobile-based applications. Context-awareness is being used to cope with the limitations of mobile systems and is an important area of recent research on mobile and ubiquitous system. Context plays a fundamental role in awareness applications. Activities of mobile users can be monitored by the context provided through sensors connected with user and her environment. One of the basic requirements in context-aware mobile applications is privacy and sharing control in Collaborative Working Environment (CWE). Sharing control, in the authors' system, is the distributed and dynamic control of sharing policies and information being shared. Dynamic nature of context is helpful in making automated decisions based on the current situation, for example, dynamic adaptation of level of context information being shared among collaborating users, dynamic adaptation of sharing control decisions, and dynamic adaptation of rules for sharing control.

2011

Abstract Recent years have seen a confluence of two major trends--the increase of mobile devices such as smart phones as the primary access point to networked information and the rise of social media platforms that connect people. Their convergence supports the emergence of a new class of context-aware geosocial networking applications.

International Journal of Smart Home

In this work, we introduce the Privacy Manager, a user interface designed to allow nonexpert users to manage privacy in the envisioned era of pervasive computing. The Privacy Manager is part of the implementation of the User-centric Privacy Framework, which was introduced as a novel mechanism to enable personal privacy for the inhabitants of the smart home. The Privacy Manager interface incorporates a set of application parts designed especially to meet the requirements of user friendliness, and privacy awareness, with the goal of making privacy management an affordable task for common users. Our first prototype allows to: i) customize permissions for the disclosure of their personal data, ii) control active and passive interactions with services, iii) define obligations to be negotiated on the usage of the data, upon transmission, iv) be aware of privacy related issues such as granted and denied permissions, v) apply alternative privacy mechanisms to access control, as white lying and obfuscation, vi) adhere to enterprise privacy policies based on a contractual relationship with an enterprise or organization. Providing people with tools to control their privacy is critical to guarantee the success of pervasive computing.

Recent advances in mobile communications, location and sensing technologies and data processing are boosting the deployment of context-aware personalized services and the creation of smart environments. Nevertheless, they pose a serious risk on user privacy rights, since they demand, collect and process a large amount of personal data. Although technology makes the collection of data easy, its protection against abuse is left to data protection legislation. However, privacy and security requirements, other than being general and abstract terms to be regarded as legislature issues, should be brought down in the technological reality and carefully accounted for in devising technical solutions. In order to limit the disclosure and avoid the misuse of personal data, this paper introduces a distributed unit of trust, which acts as a mediating entity that manages, in a privacy respectful manner, the exchange of personal data among users, service providers, communication networks and monitoring and sensing devices.

2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2012

As personal information and context sharing applications gain traction more attention is drawn to the associated privacy issues. These applications address privacy using an unsatisfactory "whitelist" approach, similar to social networks "friends". Some of them also link location publishing with user interaction which is also a form of privacy control-the user has to explicitly say where he is. There are a few automatic location based-services (LBS) that track the user, but without more adequate privacy protection mechanisms they enable even bigger threats to the user. On previous work, an XMPP-based Context Distribution Architecture was defined, more suitable for the distribution of frequently changing context than other systems because it is based on the publish-subscribe pattern. In this paper the authors present an extension to this architecture that allows for the introduction of a complex degree of access control in context distribution. The devised changes enable the system to consider a number of interesting context privacy settings for context distribution control. Also, this control must be enforced in a way that it doesn't interfere with the real-time nature of the distribution process. After describing the enhancements to the architecture, a prototype of the system is presented. Finally, the delivery latency and additional processing introduced by the access control components is estimated by testing it against the existing system.