Privacy-enhanced social network routing in opportunistic networks

Abstract

Abstract-Opportunistic networking -forwarding messages in a disconnected mobile ad hoc network via any encountered nodes -otters a new mechanism for exploiting the mobile devices that many users already carry. Forwarding messages in such a network often involves the use of social network routing-sending messages via nodes in the sender or recipient's social network. Simple social network routing, however, may broadcast these social networks, which introduces privacy concerns. This paper introduces two methods for enhancing privacy in social network routing by obfuscating the social network graphs used to inform routing decisions. We evaluate these methods using two real-world datasets, and find that it is possible to obfuscate the social network information without leading to a significant decrease in routing performance.

Utilizing social links for location privacy in opportunistic delay-tolerant networks

“…For example, in Pocketswitched Networks [5], a mobile phone carried by a person is associated with that person identity and the detection of this mobile phone location at different times is almost equivalent to tracking its owner. Parris et al [12] propose using obfuscation of user's own social network exchanged as part of the social-forwarding protocol in DTN, by altering or hiding the social network information, in order to prevent the attacker from inferring any physical proximity between nodes on the message delivery path. These techniques affect forwarding but are not applicable when the node has to access LBS and provide location information for the request to be answered correctly.…”

“…We use real-world SASSY [12] dataset contributed by Bigwood et al, where they have recorded the mobile encounters of 27 participants (22 undergraduate students, 3 post-graduate students and 2 staff members) carrying T-mote sensor nodes in their day-to-day life activities over the period of three months. The range of these devices was about 10m, and encounters were uploaded to a base-station regularly.…”

Erasure coding with replication to defend against malicious attacks in DTN

“…The work by Parris et al [15] is concerned with another security aspect of DTN namely user privacy, where they proposed a technique to hide the social contacts of nodes. Rongxing et al [10] proposed a privacy preserving protocol for VANET, where a number of predetermined trusted Road Side Units (RSUs) acted as a middle-man to help achieve source/destination anonymity.…”

“…Rongxing et al [10] proposed a privacy preserving protocol for VANET, where a number of predetermined trusted Road Side Units (RSUs) acted as a middle-man to help achieve source/destination anonymity. Both [15] and [10] address different challenges in Social Opportunistic networks and VANET respectively in specific classes of DTN network and do not focus on malicious behavior aimed at disrupting communication. [16] proposed using a watchdog technique in MANET to detect and isolate misbehaving nodes using EC, where intermediaries check passing messages in order to detect such behavior and inform other nodes.…”

Privacy-enhanced social-network routing

“…We augment our previous paper [1] with extended evaluations using additional datasets, and we discuss linkability and eavesdropping attacks against our schemes. The paper is outlined as follows.…”