Role-Based Adaptation of Privacy Strategies in Mobile  Environments

Various approaches for privacy strategies with different properties regarding the performance, cost and strength of privacy have been proposed. For example in the privacy enhancing Tor-Network [1] packets are routed over multiple hops and in every hop encryption operations take place. Usually this causes so much delay that it is unsuitable for Voice-over-IP calls [2]. However, with different trust assumptions better performance can be achieved by reducing the number of hops [3]. In general a solution space is built between application requirements, performance and privacy properties of different approaches.

For every use case the user has to decide on a privacy enhancing service. This decision is hard without further knowledge about privacy strategies. Therefore, our vision is an automatic adaptation framework for privacy strategies that is based on adaptive role-based software. For example, this framework should adapt the privacy when a person comes home from work and her or his mobile phone switches from the cellular network to his home WLAN.

My contribution to this vision will be the identification of privacy roles, the atomic concepts used in privacy enhancing services. Further, I will analyze the properties of them and their combinations.

 

[1] Dingledine, Roger, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson. „Tor: The second-generation onion router.“ Naval Research Lab Washington DC, 2004.

[2] Dhungel, Prithula, et al. „Waiting for anonymity: Understanding delays in the Tor overlay.“ Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P), 2010 IEEE Tenth International Conference on. IEEE, 2010

[3] Le Blond, Stevens, et al. „Herd: A scalable, traffic analysis resistant anonymity network for VoIP systems.“ ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. Vol. 45. No. 4. ACM, 2015.