Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Mobile Applications
Event details
| Date | 26.05.2009 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Urs Hengartner, University of Waterloo, Canada |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Recently, social-networking applications have started to appear on
mobile phones. These applications can exploit a phone's positioning
capabilities to facilitate interaction between people. From a privacy
point of view, this trend is troublesome because it often results in
the provider of a social-networking application having real-time
access to users' location. In turn, a user's location could reveal
information about her activities or interests to the provider. I will
outline two solutions that protect a user's location privacy. The
first solution allows a user to become aware of a friend who happens
to be nearby without the friend and the user being able to track each
other continuously and without a centralized party being able to track
either of them. The second solution allows a user to access a
location-based service (e.g., a service that provides a listing of
points of interest close to the user) such that the server cannot
distinguish between the user issuing the query and other nearby
users. Both of the presented solutions are based on cryptography and
have been implemented and evaluated. The prototype implementation of
our privacy-protecting application for alerting people of nearby
friends is available at .
Urs Hengartner is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton
School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His
research interests are in information privacy and in computer and
networks security. His current research goals are to increase the
security of emerging computing environments, such as pervasive
computing, location-based services, and electronic voting, and to
design privacy-enhancing technologies for people who want to benefit
from these environments. He has a degree in computer science from ETH
Zurich and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.
Practical information
- General public
- Free