Biblio

The problem of maintaining the privacy of sensitive healthcare data is crucial yet the significance of research efforts achieved still need robust development in privacy protection techniques for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). This paper aims to investigate different privacy-preserving methods for WMSNs that can be applied in healthcare, to guarantee a privacy-aware transmission of multimedia data between sensors and base stations. The combination of ant colony optimization-based routing and hierarchical structure of the network have been proposed in the AntSensNet WMSN-based routing protocol to offer QoS and power efficient multipath multimedia packet scheduling. In this paper, the AntSensNet routing protocol was extended by utilizing privacy-preserving mechanisms thus achieving anonymity / pseudonymity, unlinkability, and location privacy. The vulnerability of standard AntSensNet routing protocol to privacy threats have raised the need for the following privacy attacks’ countermeasures: (i) injection of fake traffic, which achieved anonymity, privacy of source and base locations, as well as unlinkability; (ii) encrypting and correlating the size of scalar and multimedia data which is transmitted through a WMSN, along with encrypting and correlating the size of ants, to achieve unlinkability and location privacy; (iii) pseudonyms to achieve unlinkability. The impact of these countermeasures is assessed using quantitative performance analysis conducted through simulation to gauge the overhead of the added privacy countermeasures. It can be concluded that the introduced modifications did enhance the privacy but with a penalty of increased delay and multimedia jitter. The health condition of a patient determines the vitals to be monitored which affects the volumes and sources of fake traffic. Consequently, desired privacy level will dictate incurred overhead due to multimedia transmissions and privacy measures.

Existing digital identity management systems fail to deliver the desirable properties of control by the users of their own identity data, credibility of disclosed identity data, and network-level anonymity. The recently proposed Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) approach promises to give users these properties. However, we argue that without addressing privacy at the network level, SSI systems cannot deliver on this promise. In this paper we present the design and analysis of our solution TCID, created in collaboration with the Dutch government. TCID is a system consisting of a set of components that together satisfy seven functional requirements to guarantee the desirable system properties. We show that the latency incurred by network-level anonymization in TCID is significantly larger than that of identity data disclosure protocols but is still low enough for practical situations. We conclude that current research on SSI is too narrowly focused on these data disclosure protocols.

A current trend on the Internet is the increasing surveillance of its users. A few big service providers have divided most of the user-facing Internet between them, observing and recording the activities of their users to increase profits. Additionally, government agencies have been found to practice mass surveillance. With regard to this it becomes even more important to provide online services that protect the privacy of their users and avoid censorship by single, powerful entities. To reach these goals, a trusted third party should be avoided. A prototype service which fulfills these goals is DPS-Discuss, a decentralized, pseudonymous online discussion application. It uses the libraries BitNym and Peer-Tor-Peer for pseudonym management and anonymous communication.