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

Abstract

This paper is concerned with improving locationprivacy for users accessing location-based services in opportunistic DTNs. We design a protocol that offers location privacy through request/reply location obfuscation technique that uses the nodes' own social network to drive the forwarding heuristic. We propose a fully distributed socialbased location privacy protocol (SLPD) that utilizes social ties between nodes to ensure K-Anonymity, i.e. the requesting node's locations cannot be determined from at least k-1 other nodes in its social network. We evaluate SLPD using extensive simulations and real connectivity data traces. We compare our results to a benchmark protocol that requires centralized trusted server. We show that our distributed protocol is applicable to DTNs with various mobility patterns, and provides the user with the required privacy at less than 30% of the privacy range we define. SLPD achieves success ratios similar to the ones obtained using centralized benchmark solutions up to 15% privacy requirements.

AdaptAnon: Adaptive anonymity for service queries in mobile opportunistic networks

“…Due to the recent wide penetration of mobile devices in everyday's life activities, there has been an intense research on how to design data dissemination protocols within mobile social opportunistic networks [1,2,3,4,12,17,18]. These protocols are typically based on the assumption that encounters between mobile devices are more likely to occur between people in the same social network than between random strangers -i.e.…”

Reform ID-Achieving Proximate Node Anonymity in MOSNs

“…FindU [14] leverages secure multi-party communication to enable a user to find the best match user with limited information exchange. Liang et al [16] further propose a serial of profile matching algorithms with full anonymity. The work in [17] lets each node continually change its pseudonym to protect its privacy in MOSNs.…”

“…Anonymizing node interests or attributes for privacy protection in MOSNs has been studied [10] - [13] and [14] - [17]. which uses the solution for "the millionaire's problem" to blindly check whether two nodes have similar interests.…”

“…Since those services are built upon node encountering, nodes need to collect real ID based encountering information. There are rich investigations on protecting node privacy in MOSNs [10] - [17]. In current MOSN applications, nodes can collect real ID based encountering information easily since neighbour nodes communicate with real IDs directly.…”

An investigation on the unwillingness of nodes to participate in mobile delay tolerant network routing

“…Zakhary and Radenkovic [60] presented a location privacy protocol that is based on the utilization of social information of nodes. In this protocol, each node maintains a social profile, which includes n profile attributes.…”