Computer Engineering Commons^™

From Protecting To Performing Privacy, Garfield Benjamin

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

Privacy is increasingly important in an age of facial recognition technologies, mass data collection, and algorithmic decision-making. Yet it persists as a contested term, a behavioural paradox, and often fails users in practice. This article critiques current methods of thinking privacy in protectionist terms, building on Deleuze's conception of the society of control, through its problematic relation to freedom, property and power. Instead, a new mode of understanding privacy in terms of performativity is provided, drawing on Butler and Sedgwick as well as Cohen and Nissenbaum. This new form of privacy is based on identity, consent and collective action, a …

The Data Market: A Proposal To Control Data About You, David Shaw, Daniel W. Engels

SMU Data Science Review

The current legal and economic infrastructure facilitating data collection practices and data analysis has led to extreme over-collection of data and the overall loss of personal privacy. Data over-collection has led to a secondary market for consumer data that is invisible to the consumer and results in a person's data being distributed far beyond their knowledge or control. In this paper, we propose a Data Market framework and design for personal data management and privacy protection in which the individual controls and profits from the dissemination of their data. Our proposed Data Market uses a market-based approach utilizing blockchain distributed …

The Robot Privacy Paradox: Understanding How Privacy Concerns Shape Intentions To Use Social Robots, Christoph Lutz, Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux

Human-Machine Communication

Conceptual research on robots and privacy has increased but we lack empirical evidence about the prevalence, antecedents, and outcomes of different privacy concerns about social robots. To fill this gap, we present a survey, testing a variety of antecedents from trust, technology adoption, and robotics scholarship. Respondents are most concerned about data protection on the manufacturer side, followed by social privacy concerns and physical concerns. Using structural equation modeling, we find a privacy paradox, where the perceived benefits of social robots override privacy concerns.

A New Grid Partitioning Technology For Location Privacy Protection, Yue Sun, Lei Zhang, Jing Li, Zhen Zhang

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Nowadays, the location-based service (LBS) has become an essential part of convenient service in people's daily life. However, the untrusted LBS servers can store lots of information about the user, such as the user's identity, location, and destination. Then the information can be used as background knowledge and combined with the query frequency of the user to launch the inference attack to obtain user's privacy. In most of the existing schemes, the author considers the algorithm of virtual location selection from the historical location of the user. However, the LBS server can infer the user's location information on the historical …

Deepmag+ : Sniffing Mobile Apps In Magnetic Field Through Deep Learning, Rui Ning, Cong Wang, Chunsheng Xin, Jiang Li, Hongyi Wu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper reports a new side-channel attack to smartphones using the unrestricted magnetic sensor data. We demonstrate that attackers can effectively infer the Apps being used on a smartphone with an accuracy of over 80%, through training a deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Various signal processing strategies have been studied for feature extractions, including a tempogram based scheme. Moreover, by further exploiting the unrestricted motion sensor to cluster magnetometer data, the sniffing accuracy can increase to as high as 98%. To mitigate such attacks, we propose a noise injection scheme that can effectively reduce the App sniffing accuracy to only …

Bibliometric Survey Of Privacy Of Social Media Network Data Publishing, Rupali Gangarde Ass. Prof., Amit Sharma Dr., Ambika Pawar Dr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

We are witness to see exponential growth of the social media network since the year 2002. Leading social media networking sites used by people are Twitter, Snapchats, Facebook, Google, and Instagram, etc. The latest global digital report (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick 2019) states that there exist more than 800 million current online social media users, and the number is still exploding day by day. Users share their day to day activities such as their photos and locations etc. on social media platforms. This information gets consumed by third party users, like marketing companies, researchers, and government firms. Depending upon the purpose, …

Different Approaches To Blurring Digital Images And Their Effect On Facial Detection, Erich-Matthew Pulfer

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the usage of multiple image blurring techniques and determine their effectiveness in combatting facial detection algorithms. This type of analysis is anticipated to reveal potential flaws in the privacy expected from blurring images or, rather, portions of images. Three different blurring algorithms were designed and implemented: a box blurring method, a Gaussian blurring method, and a differential privacy-based pixilation method. Datasets of images were collected from multiple sources, including the AT&T Database of Faces. Each of these three methods were implemented via their own original method, but, because of how common they …

Unicorn Framework: A User-Centric Approach Toward Formal Verification Of Privacy Norms, Rezvan Joshaghani

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the development of complex systems, such as user-centric privacy management systems with multiple components and attributes, it is important to formalize the process and develop mathematical models that can be utilized to automatically make decisions on the information sharing actions of users. While valuable, the current state-of-the-art models are mostly based on enterprise/organizational privacy perspectives and leave the main actor, i.e., the user, uninvolved or with limited ability to control information sharing actions. These approaches cannot be applied to a user-centric environment since user privacy policies are dynamic because they change based on the information sharing context and environment. …

Permission-Based Privacy Analysis For Android Applications, Erza Gashi, Zhilbert Tafa

International Journal of Business and Technology

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) trends are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile applications are becoming more and more popular. Mostly due to their pervasiveness and the level of interaction with the users, along with the great number of advantages, the mobile applications bring up a great number of privacy related issues as well. These platforms can gather our very sensitive private data by only granting them a list of permissions during the installation process. Additionally, most of the users can find it difficult, or even useless, to analyze system permissions. Thus, their guess of app’s safety …

Comprehending The Safety Paradox And Privacy Concerns With Medical Device Remote Patient Monitoring, Marc Doyle

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Medical literature identifies a number of technology-driven improvements in disease management such as implantable medical devices (IMDs) that are a standard treatment for candidates with specific diseases. Among patients using implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICD), for example, problems and issues are being discovered faster compared to patients without monitoring, improving safety. What is not known is why patients report not feeling safer, creating a safety paradox, and why patients identify privacy concerns in ICD monitoring.

There is a major gap in the literature regarding the factors that contribute to perceived safety and privacy in remote patient monitoring (RPM). To address this …

Privacy Issues In Post Dissemination On Facebook, Burcu Sayi̇n Günel, Serap Şahi̇n, Dimitris G. Kogias, Charalampos Z. Patrikakis

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

With social networks (SNs) being populated by a still increasing numbers of people who take advantage of the communication and collaboration capabilities that they offer, the probability of the exposure of people's personal moments to a wider than expected audience is also increasing. By studying the functionalities and characteristics that modern SNs offer, along with the people's habits and common behaviors in them, it is easy to understand that several privacy risks may exist, many of which people may be unaware of. In this paper, we focus on users' interactions with posts in a social network (SN), using Facebook as …

Exploring Photo Privacy Protection On Smartphones, David Darling

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The proliferation of modern smartphone camera use in the past decade has resulted in unprecedented numbers of personal photos being taken and stored on popular devices. However, it has also caused privacy concerns. These photos sometimes contain potentially harmful information if they were to be leaked such as the personally identifiable information found on ID cards or in legal documents. With current security measures on iOS and Android phones, it is possible for 3rd party apps downloaded from official app stores or other locations to access the photo libraries on these devices without user knowledge or consent. Additionally, the prevalence …

How Much Privacy Do We Have Today? A Study Of The Life Of Marc Mezvinsky, Miguel Mares, Salomon Gilles, Brian D. Gobran, Dan Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a case study evaluating the level of information available about an individual through public, Internet-accessible sources. Privacy is a basic tenet of democratic society, but technological advances have made access to information and the identification of individuals much easier through Internet-accessible databases and information stores. To determine the potential level of privacy available to an individual in today’s interconnected world, we sought to develop a detailed history of Marc Mezvinsky, a semi-public figure, husband of Chelsea Clinton, and son of two former members of the United States House of Representatives. By utilizing only publicly and …

Assessing The Competing Characteristics Of Privacy And Safety Within Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Jacob W. Connors

Theses and Dissertations

The introduction of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication has the promise of decreasing vehicle collisions, congestion, and emissions. However, this technology places safety and privacy at odds; an increase of safety applications will likely result in the decrease of consumer privacy. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed the Security Credential Management System (SCMS) as the back end infrastructure for maintaining, distributing, and revoking vehicle certificates attached to every Basic Safety Message (BSM). This Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme is designed around the philosophy of maintaining user privacy through the separation of functions to prevent any one subcomponent from identifying …

Modeling Adversarial Insider Vehicles In Mix Zones, Nicholas Plewtong

Master's Theses

Security is a necessity when dealing with new forms of technology that may not have been analyzed from a security perspective. One of the latest growing technological advances are Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). VANETs allow vehicles to communicate information to each other wirelessly which allows for an increase in safety and efficiency for vehicles. However, with this new type of computerized system comes the need to maintain security on top of it.

In order to try to protect location privacy of the vehicles in the system, vehicles change pseudonyms or identifiers at areas known as mix zones. This thesis implements …

Ears-Dm: Efficient Auto Correction Retrieval Scheme For Data Management In Edge Computing, Kai Fan, Jie Yin, Kuan Zhang, Hui Li, Yintang Wang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Edge computing is an extension of cloud computing that enables messages to be acquired and processed at low cost. Many terminal devices are being deployed in the edge network to sense and deal with the massive data. By migrating part of the computing tasks from the original cloud computing model to the edge device, the message is running on computing resources close to the data source. The edge computing model can effectively reduce the pressure on the cloud computing center and lower the network bandwidth consumption. However, the security and privacy issues in edge computing are worth noting. In this …

Breadcrumbs: Privacy As A Privilege, Prachi Bhardwaj

Capstones

Breadcrumbs: Privacy as a Privilege Abstract

By: Prachi Bhardwaj

In 2017, the world saw more data breaches than in any year prior. The count was more than the all-time high record in 2016, which was 40 percent more than the year before that.

That’s because consumer data is incredibly valuable today. In the last three decades, data storage has gone from being stored physically to being stored almost entirely digitally, which means consumer data is more accessible and applicable to business strategies. As a result, companies are gathering data in ways previously unknown to the average consumer, and hackers are …

Privacy Risks And Security Threats In Mhealth Apps, Brinda Hansraj Sampat, Bala Prabhakar

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

mHealth (Mobile Health) applications (apps) have transformed the doctor-patient relationship. They help users with varied functionalities such as monitoring their health, understanding specific health conditions, consulting doctors online and achieving fitness goals. Whilst these apps provide an option of equitable and convenient access to healthcare, a lot of personal and sensitive data about users is collected, stored and shared to achieve these functionalities. Little is known about the privacy and security concerns these apps address. Based on literature review, this paper identifies the privacy risks and security features for evaluating thirty apps in the Medical category across two app distribution …

Permission-Based Privacy Analysis For Android Applications, Erza Gashi, Zhilbert Tafa

UBT International Conference

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) trends are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile applications are becoming more and more popular. Mostly due to their pervasiveness and the level of interaction with the users, along with the great number of advantages, the mobile applications bring up a great number of privacy related issues as well. These platforms can gather our very sensitive private data by only granting them a list of permissions during the installation process. Additionally, most of the users can find it difficult, or even useless, to analyze system permissions. Thus, their guess of app’s safety …

Breaking Into The Vault: Privacy, Security And Forensic Analysis Of Android Vault Applications, Xiaolu Zhang, Ibrahim Baggili, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we share the first account for the forensic analysis, security and privacy of Android vault applications. Vaults are designed to be privacy enhancing as they allow users to hide personal data but may also be misused to hide incriminating files. Our work has already helped law enforcement in the state of Connecticut to reconstruct 66 incriminating images and 18 videos in a single criminal case. We present case studies and results from analyzing 18 Android vault applications (accounting for nearly 220 million downloads from the Google Play store) by reverse engineering them and examining the forensic artifacts …

Security For 5g Mobile Wireless Networks, Dongfeng Fang, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The advanced features of 5G mobile wireless network systems yield new security requirements and challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on security of 5G wireless network systems compared to the traditional cellular networks. The paper starts with a review on 5G wireless networks particularities as well as on the new requirements and motivations of 5G wireless security. The potential attacks and security services with the consideration of new service requirements and new use cases in 5G wireless networks are then summarized. The recent development and the existing schemes for the 5G wireless security are presented based on the corresponding …

Lightweight Three-Factor Authentication And Key Agreement Protocol For Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks, Qi Jiang, Sherali Zeadally, Jianfeng Ma, Debiao He

Information Science Faculty Publications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will be integrated into the future Internet as one of the components of the Internet of Things, and will become globally addressable by any entity connected to the Internet. Despite the great potential of this integration, it also brings new threats, such as the exposure of sensor nodes to attacks originating from the Internet. In this context, lightweight authentication and key agreement protocols must be in place to enable end-to-end secure communication. Recently, Amin et al. proposed a three-factor mutual authentication protocol for WSNs. However, we identified several flaws in their protocol. We found that their …

Data-Driven Network-Centric Threat Assessment, Dae Wook Kim

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

As the Internet has grown increasingly popular as a communication and information sharing platform, it has given rise to two major types of Internet security threats related to two primary entities: end-users and network services. First, information leakages from networks can reveal sensitive information about end-users. Second, end-users systems can be compromised through attacks on network services, such as scanning-and-exploit attacks, spamming, drive-by downloads, and fake anti-virus software. Designing threat assessments to detect these threats is, therefore, of great importance, and a number of the detection systems have been proposed. However, these existing threat assessment systems face significant challenges in …

When Machines Decide: Justice.Exe Learning Modules, Praxis Lab Team

Law School Historical Documents

Learning modules for the Praxis Lab Honors Course

When Machines Decide: Creating Justice.Exe, Randy Dryer, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Austin Anderson, Abigail Busath, Logan Cox, Morgan Cox, Logan Erickson, Zachary Grena, Joseph Hutchins, Skyler Jayson, Andrew Yang

Law School Historical Documents

Our Praxis Lab centered on the increasingly important need for algorithmic literacy, transparency and oversight, particularly in the context of the use of algorithms in the criminal justice system. Accordingly, we (1) designed an educational simulation to illustrate the function of algorithms in the context of criminal sentencing; (2) created several pre-packaged course modules that faculty in a variety of disciplines could integrate into their existing curriculum to educate students about algorithms and their increasing role in modern society; and (3) curated a set of best practices designed to promote the transparency and oversight of algorithmic systems.

Emergent Ai, Social Robots And The Law: Security, Privacy And Policy Issues, Ramesh Subramanian

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

The rapid growth of AI systems has implications on a wide variety of fields. It can prove to be a boon to disparate fields such as healthcare, education, global logistics and transportation, to name a few. However, these systems will also bring forth far-reaching changes in employment, economy and security. As AI systems gain acceptance and become more commonplace, certain critical questions arise: What are the legal and security ramifications of the use of these new technologies? Who can use them, and under what circumstances? What is the safety of these systems? Should their commercialization be regulated? What are the …

Blown To Bits Project, David Schmidt

Informatics Open Educational Resources

The book, Blown to Bits, uncovers the many ways that the new digital world has changed and is changing our whole environment. Some changes are incremental but others are more revolutionary. Some of the changes that we welcome are slowly eroding our privacy and are changing the rules of ownership. This book illuminates the complexities of these changes. I have attempted to capture the central points in selected chapters, and in some cases I have added new material or new examples to replace dated material. I picked chapters to summarize that address the following topics (and more). There are many …

Video Annotation By Crowd Workers With Privacy-Preserving Local Disclosure, Apeksha Dipak Kumavat

Open Access Theses

Advancements in computer vision are still not reliable enough for detecting video content including humans and their actions. Microtask crowdsourcing on task markets such as Amazon Mechnical Turk and Upwork can bring humans into the loop. However, engaging crowd workers to annotate non-public video footage risks revealing the identities of people in the video who may have a right to anonymity.

This thesis demonstrates how we can engage untrusted crowd workers to detect behaviors and objects, while robustly concealing the identities of all faces. We developed a web-based system that presents obfuscated videos to crowd workers, and provides them with …

Content Mining Techniques For Detecting Cyberbullying In Social Media, Shawniece L. Parker, Yen-Hung Hu

Virginia Journal of Science

The use of social media has become an increasingly popular trend, primarily among teenagers. A major problem concerning teens using social media is that they are often unaware of the dangers involved when using these media. They are also more inclined to misuse social media because they are often unaware of the privacy rights associated with their use, or the rights of other users. As a result, cyberbullying cases have steadily risen in recent years, often going undiscovered or not being discovered until serious harm has been caused to the victims. This study aims to create an effective algorithm that …

Privacy And The Information Age: A Longitudinal View, Charles E. Downing

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

As information systems and data storage capacity become increasingly sophisticated, an important ethical question for organizations is “What can/will/should be done with the personal information that has been and can be collected?” Individuals’ privacy is certainly important, but so is less costly and more targeted business processes. As this conflict intensifies, consumers, managers and policy makers are left wondering: What privacy principles are important to guide organizations in self-regulation? For example, do consumers view the five rights originally stated in the European Data Protection Directive as important? Comprehensive? Is there a product discount point where consumers would forsake these principles? …