Biblio
The widespread adoption of social networking and cloud computing has transformed today's Internet to a trove of personal information. As a consequence, data breaches are expected to increase in gravity and occurrence. To counteract unintended data disclosure, a great deal of effort has been dedicated in devising methods for uncovering privacy leaks. Existing solutions, however, have not addressed the time- and data-intensive nature of leak detection. The shift from hardware-specific implementation to software-based solutions is the core idea behind the concept of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). On the other hand, the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm is characterized by the decoupling of the forwarding and control planes. In this paper, an SDN/NFV-enabled architecture is proposed for improving the efficiency of leak detection systems. Employing a previously developed identification strategy, Personally Identifiable Information detector (PIID) and load balancer VNFs are packaged and deployed in OpenStack through an NFV MANO. Meanwhile, SDN controllers permit the load balancer to dynamically redistribute traffic among the PIID instances. In a physical testbed, tests are conducted to evaluate the proposed architecture. Experimental results indicate that the proportions of forwarding and parsing on total overhead is influenced by the traffic intensity. Furthermore, an NFV-enabled system with scalability features was found to outperform a non-virtualized implementation in terms of latency (85.1%), packet loss (98.3%) and throughput (8.41%).
The ubiquity of portable mobile devices equipped with built-in cameras have led to a transformation in how and when digital images are captured, shared, and archived. Photographs and videos from social gatherings, public events, and even crime scenes are commonplace online. While the spontaneity afforded by these devices have led to new personal and creative outlets, privacy concerns of bystanders (and indeed, in some cases, unwilling subjects) have remained largely unaddressed. We present I-Pic, a trusted software platform that integrates digital capture with user-defined privacy. In I-Pic, users choose alevel of privacy (e.g., image capture allowed or not) based upon social context (e.g., out in public vs. with friends vs. at workplace). Privacy choices of nearby users are advertised via short-range radio, and I-Pic-compliant capture platforms generate edited media to conform to privacy choices of image subjects. I-Pic uses secure multiparty computation to ensure that users' visual features and privacy choices are not revealed publicly, regardless of whether they are the subjects of an image capture. Just as importantly, I-Pic preserves the ease-of-use and spontaneous nature of capture and sharing between trusted users. Our evaluation of I-Pic shows that a practical, energy-efficient system that conforms to the privacy choices of many users within a scene can be built and deployed using current hardware.
In the early days of the web, content was designed and hosted by a single person, group, or organization. No longer. Webpages are increasingly composed of content from myriad unrelated "third-party" websites in the business of advertising, analytics, social networking, and more. Third-party services have tremendous value: they support free content and facilitate web innovation. But third-party services come at a privacy cost: researchers, civil society organizations, and policymakers have increasingly called attention to how third parties can track a user's browsing activities across websites. This paper surveys the current policy debate surrounding third-party web tracking and explains the relevant technology. It also presents the FourthParty web measurement platform and studies we have conducted with it. Our aim is to inform researchers with essential background and tools for contributing to public understanding and policy debates about web tracking.