SmokeScreen: flexible privacy controls for presence-sharing

ABSTRACT

Presence-sharing is an emerging platform for mobile applications, but presence-privacy remains a challenge. Privacy controls must be flexible enough to allow sharing between both trusted social relations and untrusted strangers. In this paper, we present a system called SmokeScreen that provides flexible and power-efficient mechanisms for privacy management.

Broadcasting clique signals, which can only be interpreted by other trusted users, enables sharing between social relations; broadcasting opaque identifiers (OIDs), which can only be resolved to an identity by a trusted broker, enables sharing between strangers. Computing these messages is power-efficient since they can be pre-computed with acceptable storage costs.

In evaluating these mechanisms we first analyzed traces from an actual presence-sharing application. Four months of traces provide evidence of anonymous snooping, even among trusted users. We have also implemented our mechanisms on two devices and found the power demands of clique signals and OIDs to be reasonable. A mobile phone running our software can operate for several days on a single charge.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.4 Communications Management
          Subjects: Network communication

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection
          Subjects: Access controls
      D.4.7 Organization and Design
          Subjects: Distributed systems
      D.4.8 Performance
          Subjects: Measurements

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.5 Security and Protection (D.4.6, K.4.2)

General Terms:
Human Factors, Measurement, Security

Keywords:
location privacy, mobile computing, pervasive computing, presence-sharing, social networks