Laboratory for Communications and Applications LCA

Research Collaboration - LCA1 and Nokia

• Research Mission and Achievements

• Current Joint Research Activities

Pervasive Community Privacy		Context-Aware In-Device Privacy Controls
Enhanced with novel peer-to-peer wireless communication capabilities, mobile devices can significantly increase the routing, forwarding performance and context awareness of pervasive networks, due to the structured and time-evolving interactions among mobile users and their communities. Meanwhile, network operators increasingly deploy low-power and low-range base stations, which allows them to track and infer accurate community information, at the expense of users' privacy. In this project [1] we address the important issue of privacy in pervasive communities and evaluate the extent of private community information exposure vis-à-vis a practical adversary that controls a wireless mesh network of 37 APs distributed across a 200 x 100 m densely populated target region of the EPFL campus.		Millions of third-party mobile applications are available from different mobile application stores, such as Windows Phone, Android and iOS. A common privacy protection mechanism consists in making each application declare the information it accesses and letting the user decide whether or not to install the application. Unfortunately, such a scheme has proven to be of limited use to the end-user. This project aims at designing mechanisms that provide more information to users, in a more understandable way, and to help them make insightful privacy decisions when installing and using third-party applications on their mobile devices.

• Past Joint Research Activities

Data Privacy		Location Privacy		Privacy-Triggered Networking
The amount of private information that people store and share with mobile devices is increasing, due to the availability of several third-party applications on different mobile platforms. In this project, we designed novel protocols for secure time scheduling [3,4,5] and location determination [6], which are and based on secure multi-party computation schemes suited for cloud-computing network architectures.		Location privacy is a major concern in an increasingly connected and highly pervasive network of mobile phone users [7]. In this project, we evaluated the effectiveness of standard mix-zone based privacy protection mechanisms against probabilistic tracking attacks in a real-life setting [2]. Our results provide empirical evidence about the effectiveness of mix-zone based privacy-preserving mechanisms against practical adversaries in current wireless mobile systems.		Privacy protection in pervasive social networks depends heavily on users’ context (time, location, activity, etc.) and their sensitivity to the shared data and context. Existing privacy mechanisms do not adapt well to different contexts and user sensitivities. In this project, we designed a novel scheme that dynamically regulates users' communications based on their context and its evolution over time [8,9].

• References and Patents

• [1] Bilogrevic, I., Jadliwala, M., Lam, I., Aad, I., Ginzboorg, P. , Niemi, V. and Hubaux, J.-P.. (2012) Big Brother Knows Your Friends: on Privacy of Social Communities in Pervasive Networks. 10th International Conference on Pervasive Computing.
• [2] Bindschaedler*, L., Jadliwala*, M., Bilogrevic, I., Aad, I., Ginzboorg, P., Niemi, V. and Hubaux, J.-P. (2012) Track Me If You Can: On the Effectiveness of Context-based Identifier Changes in Deployed Mobile Networks. Proceedings of the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).
• [3] Bilogrevic, I., Jadliwala, M., Kumar, P., Walia, S.S., Hubaux, J.-P., Aad, I. and Niemi, V. (2011) Meetings through the Cloud: Privacy-Preserving Scheduling on Mobile Devices. Journal of Systems and Software, Special Issue on 'Mobile Applications: Status and Trends', 84 pp. 1910-1927.
• [4] Bilogrevic, I., Jadliwala, M., Hubaux, J.-P., Aad, I. and Niemi, V. (2011) Privacy-Preserving Activity Scheduling on Mobile Devices. Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY).
• [5] Aad, I., Niemi, V., Durussel, A., De Cristofaro, E., Bilogrevic, I., Jadliwala, M., Hubaux, J.-P., (2011) Method and Apparatus for Preserving Privacy for Appointment Scheduling. Patent filed at the U.S. Patent Office.
• [6] Bilogrevic, I., Jadliwala, M., Kalkan, K., Hubaux, J.-P. and Aad, I. (2011) Privacy in Mobile Computing for Location-Sharing-Based Services . Proceedings of the 11th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS).
• [7] Jadliwala, M., Bilogrevic, I. and Hubaux, J.-P. (2011) Optimizing Mixing in Pervasive Networks: A Graph-Theoretic Perspective. Proceedings of the 16th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS).
• [8] Jadliwala, M., Freudiger, J., Aad, I., Hubaux, J.-P., and Niemi, V. (2011) Privacy-Triggered Communications in Pervasive Social Networks. In 5th IEEE WoWMoM Workshop on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications (AOC).
• [9] Aad, I., Freudiger, J., Jadliwala, M., Hubaux, J.-P., Raya, M., Leppänen, K. and Turunen, M.T. (2010) Method and Apparatus for Triggering User Communications based on Privacy Information. U.S. Patent US 2011/0219423.