Location Privacy in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks

( Human Computer Interaction (old) Series )

Sameh Zakhary, School of Computer Science & IT, University of Nottingham

Date and time: Tuesday 14th May 2013 at 16:00
Location: Learning Centre UG06
Host: Mirco Musolesi

Mobile devices have widely penetrated our lives today. Many of these devices are capable of detecting, storing and sharing users location information at various precisions reaching a few meters. This raises many privacy issues. Opportunistic mobile social networks (OppMSN), a type of Delay-Tolerant Networks, enable heterogeneous devices to communicate using store-carry-forward paradigm without an infrastructure such as 3G networks, and end-to-end communication path between devices. Users sending queries to location-based services (LBSs) over OppMSN reveal their location information. Subsequently, privacy-conscious users turn off their device's opportunistic interface to ensure their location privacy which lead to network communication failure. In this talk, we will present LPAF, our proposal for enhancing users' location-privacy over OppMSN using human social relationships and a lightweight Markov model to drive the privacy preserving protocol. LPAF is a fully distributed and collaborative K-anonymity protocol which protects the users location and ensure better privacy while forwarding queries/replies to untrusted LBSs.