Privacy, applied

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Visible to the public TWC SBE: Small: Protecting the Online Privacy of Users of Social Networks

Submitted by Keith Ross on Tue, 11/21/2017 - 6:39am

It is generally recognized that protecting online privacy is important, with modern society manifesting this concern in many ways. Preliminary research indicates that third parties, with modest crawling and computational resources, and employing simple data mining heuristics, can potentially combine online services and publicly available information to create detailed profiles of the users living in any targeted geographical area.

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Visible to the public TWC SBE: Small: Towards an Economic Foundation of Privacy-Preserving Data Analytics: Incentive Mechanisms and Fundamental Limits

Submitted by Lei Ying on Mon, 11/20/2017 - 4:48pm

The commoditization of private data has been trending up, as big data analytics is playing a more critical role in advertising, scientific research, etc. It is becoming increasingly difficult to know how data may be used, or to retain control over data about oneself. One common practice of collecting private data is based on "informed consent", where data subjects (individuals) decide whether to report data or not, based upon who is collecting the data, what data is collected, and how the data will be used.

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Visible to the public TWC: Small: Rigorous and Customizable Spatiotemporal Privacy for Location Based Applications

Submitted by Li Xiong on Mon, 11/20/2017 - 4:44pm

Rapid advances in location based applications are leading to increased concern about location privacy. Current mobile operating systems only provide users with rudimentary location access controls - either to block or allow location access - which are inadequate and inefficient in mitigating privacy threats. Most existing location obfuscation mechanisms are based on syntactic privacy models that do not consider mobility and are hence vulnerable to inference attacks.

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Visible to the public  TWC: Medium: Privacy Preserving Computation in Big Data Clouds

Submitted by Ling Liu on Mon, 11/20/2017 - 4:28pm

Privacy is critical to freedom of creativity and innovation. Assured privacy protection offers unprecedented opportunities for industry innovation, science and engineering discovery, as well as new life enhancing experiences and opportunities.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: New Protocols and Systems for RAM-Based Secure Computation

Submitted by Mariana Raykova on Mon, 11/20/2017 - 6:40am

Secure computation allows users to collaboratively compute any program on their private data, while ensuring that they learn nothing beyond the output of the computation. Existing protocols for secure computation primarily rely on a boolean-circuit representation for the program being evaluated, which can be highly inefficient. This project focuses on developing secure-computation protocols in the RAM model of computation. Particularly challenging here is the need to ensure that memory accesses are oblivious, and do not leak information about private data.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Leakage of Communications Signatures: Analysis of Eavesdropping Attacks and Proactive Countermeasures

Submitted by Marwan Krunz on Tue, 11/14/2017 - 12:43pm

As society continues to depend on the rapidly expanding wireless ecosystem, we are challenged with serious threats related to user privacy, data confidentiality, and critical system availability. A significant portion of these threats is attributed to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions. Using commodity radio hardware, unauthorized parties can easily eavesdrop on over-the-air transmissions and breach the privacy of communicating users by tracking their whereabouts and movements, and inferring their associations, health state, and preferences.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Collaborative: Hiding Hay in a Haystack: Integrating Censorship Resistance into the Mainstream Internet

Submitted by Joan Feigenbaum on Tue, 11/14/2017 - 11:44am

Freedom and openness of the Internet are under threat. Government censors in non-democratic countries are deploying network filters to block sources of uncensored information, suppress dissent, and prevent citizens from using the Internet to exercise their human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

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Visible to the public EAGER: TWC: Collaborative: iPrivacy: Automatic Recommendation of Personalized Privacy Settings for Image Sharing

Submitted by Jianping Fan on Tue, 11/14/2017 - 11:35am

The objective of this project is to investigate a comprehensive image privacy recommendation system, called iPrivacy (image Privacy), which can efficiently and automatically generate proper privacy settings for newly shared photos that also considers consensus of multiple parties appearing in the same photo. Photo sharing has become very popular with the growing ubiquity of smartphones and other mobile devices.

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Visible to the public EAGER: Collaborative: Mapping Privacy and Surveillance Dynamics in Emerging Mobile Ecosystems: Practices and Contexts in the Netherlands and US

Submitted by Jessica Vitak on Tue, 11/14/2017 - 10:49am

The increasing ubiquity of mobile technologies creates unique privacy and surveillance challenges for users. These problems are global, but the way users, organizations, and governments approach these challenges varies based on cultural norms around privacy. This cross-cultural project evaluates how mobile users in the U.S. and the Netherlands think about and make decisions about their privacy when using mobile apps.

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Visible to the public TWC: Medium: Steganography in Empirical Sources Using Acquisition Oracle

Submitted by Jessica Fridrich on Tue, 11/14/2017 - 10:46am

The project focuses on advancing the field of digital image steganography -- a covert way of communication in which information is hidden in other objects, such as digital media files, to assure privacy. For a secure steganographic system, it should be impossible to prove the presence of hidden data. Achieving this level of security in practice is extraordinarily difficult because digital media is hard to describe using statistical models with accuracy necessary to guarantee perfect security.