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.

User's digital identity information has privacy and security requirements. Privacy requirements include confidentiality of the identity information itself, anonymity of those who verify and consume a user's identity information and unlinkability of online transactions which involve a user's identity. Security requirements include correctness, ownership assurance and prevention of counterfeits of a user's identity information. Such privacy and security requirements, although conflicting, are critical for identity management systems enabling the exchange of users' identity information between different parties during the execution of online transactions. Addressing all such requirements, without a centralized party managing the identity exchange transactions, raises several challenges. This paper presents a decentralized protocol for privacy preserving exchange of users' identity information addressing such challenges. The proposed protocol leverages advances in blockchain and zero knowledge proof technologies, as the main building blocks. We provide prototype implementations of the main building blocks of the protocol and assess its performance and security.

Biometrics are widely used for authentication in several domains, services and applications. However, only very few systems succeed in effectively combining highly secure user authentication with an adequate privacy protection of the biometric templates, due to the difficulty associated with jointly providing good authentication performance, unlinkability and irreversibility to biometric templates. This thwarts the use of biometrics in remote authentication scenarios, despite the advantages that this kind of architectures provides. We propose a user-specific approach for decoupling the biometrics from their binary representation before using biometric protection schemes based on fuzzy extractors. This allows for more reliable, flexible, irreversible and unlinkable protected biometric templates. With the proposed biometrics decoupling procedures, biometric metadata, that does not allow to recover the original biometric template, is generated. However, different biometric metadata that are generated starting from the same biometric template remain statistically linkable, therefore we propose to additionally protect these using a second authentication factor (e.g., knowledge or possession based). We demonstrate the potential of this approach within a two-factor authentication protocol for remote biometric authentication in mobile scenarios.

We set up a framework for the formal proofs of RFID protocols in the computational model. We rely on the so-called computationally complete symbolic attacker model. Our contributions are: 1) to design (and prove sound) axioms reflecting the properties of hash functions (Collision-Resistance, PRF). 2) to formalize computational unlinkability in the model. 3) to illustrate the method, providing the first formal proofs of unlinkability of RFID protocols, in the omputational model.

UnlimitID is a method for enhancing the privacy of commodity OAuth and applications such as OpenID Connect, using anonymous attribute-based credentials based on algebraic Message Authentication Codes (aMACs). OAuth is one of the most widely used protocols on the Web, but it exposes each of the requests of a user for data by each relying party (RP) to the identity provider (IdP). Our approach allows for the creation of multiple persistent and unlinkable pseudo-identities and requires no change in the deployed code of relying parties, only in identity providers and the client.

Mobile ad hoc networks have the features of open medium, dynamic topology, cooperative algorithms, lack of centralized monitoring etc. Due to these, mobile ad hoc networks are much vulnerable to security attacks when compared to wired networks. There are various routing protocols that have been developed to cope up with the limitations imposed by the ad hoc networks. But none of these routing schemes provide complete unlinkability and unobservability. In this paper we have done a survey about anonymous routing and secure communications in mobile ad hoc networks. Different routing protocols are analyzed based on public/private key pairs and cryptosystems, within that USOR can well protect user privacy against both inside and outside attackers. It is a combination of group signature scheme and ID based encryption scheme. These are run during the route discovery process. We implement USOR on ns2, and then its performance is compared with AODV.