Laboratory for Communications and Applications LCA

Location Privacy

 

Modern phones are increasingly equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and accelerometers. These new interfaces let mobile applications gather contextual information to provide richer user experience. In our work, we evaluate the threat to location privacy of these new applications and design mechanisms to preserve location privacy. We consider centralized scenarios in which the system can be globally optimized and distributed scenarios with rational mobile nodes. 

 

• Reza Shokri, George Theodorakopoulos, George Danezis, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, and Jean-Yves Le Boudec. Quantifying Location Privacy: The Case of Sporadic Location Exposure. In The 11th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), Waterloo, Canada, July 27–29, 2011.
• Reza Shokri, George Theodorakopoulos, Jean-Yves Le Boudec, and Jean-Pierre Hubaux. Quantifying Location Privacy. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), Oakland, CA, USA, May 22-25, 2011.
• J. Freudiger, R. Shokri, and J.-P. Hubaux. Evaluating the Privacy Risk of Location-Based Services. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2011.
• R. Shokri, C. Troncoso, C. Diaz, J. Freudiger, and J.-P. Hubaux. Unraveling an Old Cloak: k-anonymity for Location Privacy. In ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), Chicago, IL, USA, October 4, 2010.
• R. Shokri, J. Freudiger, and J.-P. Hubaux. A Unified Framework for Location Privacy. In HotPets 2010, also available as Technical Report EPFL-REPORT-148708, July 2010.
• M. Raya, R. Shokri, and J.-P. Hubaux. On the Tradeoff between Trust and Privacy in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks. In 3rd ACM Conference on Wireless Network Security (WiSec'10), Hoboken, NJ, March 22-24, 2010.
• J. Freudiger*, H.M. Manshaei*, J.-Y. Le Boudec, and J.-P. Hubaux. On the Age of Pseudonyms in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. In IEEE Infocom, 2010.
• R. Shokri, J. Freudiger, M. Jadliwala, and J.-P. Hubaux. A Distortion-based Metric for Location Privacy. In ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), 2009.
• J. Freudiger, M. H. Manshaei, J.-P. Hubaux, and D. C. Parkes. On Non-cooperative Location Privacy: A Game-theoretic Analysis. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2009.
• J. Freudiger, M. Raya, and J.-P. Hubaux. Self-Organized Anonymous Authentication in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. In Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, pages 350-372, 2009.
• J. Freudiger, R. Shokri, and J.-P. Hubaux. On the Optimal Placement of Mix Zones. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), pages 216-234, 2009.
• J. Freudiger, M. Raya, M. Félegyházi, P. Papadimitratos, and J.-P. Hubaux. Mix-Zones for Location Privacy in Vehicular Networks. In ACM Workshop on Wireless Networking for Intelligent Transportation Systems (WiN-ITS), Vancouver, 2007.
• G. Calandriello, P. Papadimitratos, A. Lloy, and J.-P. Hubaux, Efficient and Robust Pseudonymous Authentication in VANET. In Proceedings of VANET 2007, September 2007

 

Data Privacy

 

The apparition of social applications on the Internet encourages users to share personal data online. For example, recommender systems find items potentially interesting to users of the service based on the user profile. Similarly, online advertisers track users across websites to provide more accurate advertisement. We analyze the threat to user privacy caused by such applications and propose various privacy-preserving mechanisms. Intuitively, we protect user privacy by relying on peer-to-peer communications between users of the service and on the use of multiple identities.

 

• R. Shokri, P. Pedarsani, G. Theodorakopoulos, and J.-P. Hubaux. Preserving Privacy in Collaborative Filtering through Distributed Aggregation of Offline Profiles. In The 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), New York, NY, USA, October 22-25, 2009.
• J. Freudiger, N. Vratonjic, and J.-P. Hubaux. Towards Privacy-Friendly Online Advertising. In IEEE Web 2.0 Security and Privacy, 2009.