Title: AnonySense: Privacy-Aware People-Centric Sensing
Speaker: Prof. David Kotz (Dartmouth College)
Date: September 23, 2008
Abstract:
Personal mobile devices are increasingly equipped with the capability to sense the physical world (through cameras, microphones, and accelerometers, for example) and the network world (with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth interfaces). Such devices offer many new opportunities for cooperative sensing applications. For example, users' mobile phones may contribute data to community-oriented information services, from city-wide pollution monitoring to enterprise-wide detection of unauthorized Wi-Fi access points. This people-centric mobile-sensing model introduces a new security challenge in the design of mobile systems: protecting the privacy of participants while allowing their devices to reliably contribute high-quality data to these large-scale applications.
We describe AnonySense, a privacy-aware architecture for realizing pervasive applications based on collaborative, opportunistic sensing by personal mobile devices. AnonySense allows applications to submit sensing tasks that will be distributed across anonymous participating mobile devices, later receiving verified, yet anonymized, sensor data reports back from the field, thus providing the first secure implementation of this participatory sensing model. We describe our trust model, and the security properties that drove the design of the AnonySense system. We evaluate our prototype implementation through experiments that indicate the feasibility of this approach, and through two applications: a Wi-Fi rogue access point detector and a lost-object finder.
(--An Institute for Security Technology Studies project at Dartmouth College. This project is supported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (NCSD) under award number 2006-CS-001-000001 and by the U.S. Department of Commerce (NIST) under award number 60NANB6D6130. Points of view in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or the U.S. Department of Commerce.--)
About the Speaker:
David Kotz is a Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College in Hanover NH. During the 2008-09 academic year he is a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, in Bangalore India, and a Fulbright Research Scholar to India. At Dartmouth, he was the Executive Director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies from 2004-07, which is dedicated to interdisciplinary research and education in cyber security and trust. His research interests include security and privacy, pervasive computing, and wireless networks. He has published over 100 refereed journal and conference papers. After receiving his B.A. in Computer Science and Physics from Dartmouth in 1986, he completed his Ph.D in Computer Science from Duke University in 1991 and returned to Dartmouth to join the faculty. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and of the IEEE Computer Society, and a member of the USENIX Association. For more information see http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~dfk/.