Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Mobile Applications

Google Tech Talk
April 30, 2009

ABSTRACT

Presented by Urs Hengartner

Recently, social-networking applications have started to appear on mobile phones. These applications can exploit a phone's positioning capabilities to facilitate interaction between people. From a privacy point of view, this trend is troublesome because it often results in the provider of a social-networking application having real-time access to users' location. In turn, a user's location could reveal information about her activities or interests to the provider. I will outline two solutions that protect a user's location privacy. The first solution allows a user to become aware of a friend who happens to be nearby without the friend and the user being able to track each other continuously and without a centralized party being able to track either of them. The second solution allows a user to access a location-based service (e.g., a service that provides a listing of points of interest close to the user) such that the server cannot distinguish between the user issuing the query and other nearby users. Both of the presented solutions are based on cryptography and have been implemented and evaluated. The prototype implementation of our privacy-protecting application for alerting people of nearby friends is available at http://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/nearbyfriend.

Speaker's bio:
Urs Hengartner is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His research interests are in information privacy and in computer and networks security. His current research goals are to increase the security of emerging computing environments, such as pervasive computing, location-based services, and electronic voting, and to design privacy-enhancing technologies for people who want to benefit from these environments. He has a degree in computer science from ETH Zurich and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• tech
• talk
• privacy
• mobile

[helarymax]

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[c4h6i2s]

I totally agree !

[DrostanStudio]

You can spend all the time and energy you want blockading the door... and they will just come in through the window...

When you are susceptible to attack from many direction, you must protect yourself equally from each possibly attack (otherwise there's no point).

At close a range: there are so many alternative ways that your system could be infiltrated. This is not unique to ad-hoc networks... any wireless transmission is exposed. Stay hidden and encrypt your data. That's all you can do.

[c4h6i2s]

na not kick him in the balls just sit in the car outside or in the parking lot ... i can hack a ad hoc network with my phone fyi and as this video states privacy enhancing technologies now i wonder why that is

[DrostanStudio]

Hacking ad-hock is impossible if you aren't within range of the network.

Global networks are at risk of attack from anyone on Earth... thus the high security.

The lack of security on ad-hoc networks is because it isn't necessary: If the cost can be justified, than security will be increased.

If someone within 50 feet of you really wants access to your computer... they can get it: Do you know how easy the 'kick `em in the balls and steal his computer hack' is?

[c4h6i2s]

i hope you know how easy it is to hack ad-hoc?

[DrostanStudio]

This is a nice idea, but... if you really want a distributed system, why use a centralized network? I think a much simpler system would be to use a messaging program that runs over an ad-hoc wi-fi network.

This software and encryption is all well and good... but utilizing the physical limitations of the hardware is much more reliable (and much easier to implement).

This video presented some good ideas, but I question the suggested application of those ideas.

[catsaysmeow007]

Very Interesting, thanks.