I-Corps: iCloak: Privacy Preserving Individual Location Sharing

I-Corps：iCloak：隐私保护个人位置共享

• 批准号: 1619679
• 负责人: Li Xiong
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: Emory University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-01-01 至 2017-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1619679&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Corps; iCloak; Privacy; Preserving; Individual

As location information is frequently used for location based applications, mobile users' fear of privacy breach continues to escalate. Current mobile operating systems only provide users with minimal access control, either to block or allow location access, which are ineffective and inefficient in mitigating the privacy threats. Customers are forced to give up their location privacy in exchange for use of location based services or give up location based services in order to protect their location. In this project, the I-Corps team investigates and implements a new customizable and rigorous privacy mechanism (app) which allows mobile users to share a cloaked (approximate) location without deteriorating its utility for location based applications. The proposed technology provides mobile users an easy way to customize their privacy settings, such as when and where to share locations with what precision. In this way, mobile users will benefit from privacy-preserving location sharing with added functionalities of location-based recommendations and social networking. Location service providers and smartphone manufacturers can also integrate this privacy-preserving technique to enhance the privacy protection for users.The proposed mechanism (app) provides a rigorous and customizable privacy framework for users to share their locations with other third parties (e.g. location based service providers, or other users in location based social networks). The privacy guarantee is based on differential privacy, the state-of-art framework for privacy protection, which ensures that even given the knowledge of the user's moving patterns or all possible locations where the user may appear, an attacker still cannot figure out the true location of the user. The cloaked location, on the other hand, also guarantees optimal utility (minimal error) for location based applications, e.g., finding nearest restaurants or friends. In addition, with a user's historical locations, the proposed mechanism can also make personalized location based recommendations according to the user's moving pattern and interest of friends. The project promises significant broader impacts on enabling location based applications with privacy protection for mobile users.

随着位置信息频繁地用于基于位置的应用，移动的用户对隐私泄露的恐惧持续升级。当前的移动的操作系统仅向用户提供最小的访问控制，以阻止或允许位置访问，这在减轻隐私威胁方面是无效且低效的。 客户被迫放弃他们的位置隐私以换取使用基于位置的服务，或者放弃基于位置的服务以保护他们的位置。 在这个项目中，I-Corps团队研究并实现了一个新的可定制的和严格的隐私机制（应用程序），它允许移动的用户共享一个隐藏的（近似的）位置，而不会降低其效用的位置为基础的应用程序。 所提出的技术为移动的用户提供了一种自定义其隐私设置的简单方法，例如何时何地以何种精度共享位置。 通过这种方式，移动的用户将受益于隐私保护位置共享以及基于位置的推荐和社交网络的附加功能。位置服务提供商和智能手机制造商也可以集成这种隐私保护技术，以加强对用户的隐私保护。所提出的机制（应用程序）为用户提供了一个严格的和可定制的隐私框架，以与其他第三方（例如，基于位置的服务提供商，或基于位置的社交网络中的其他用户）共享他们的位置。 隐私保证基于差分隐私，这是最先进的隐私保护框架，它确保即使知道用户的移动模式或用户可能出现的所有可能位置，攻击者仍然无法找出用户的真实位置。另一方面，隐藏的位置还保证了基于位置的应用的最佳效用（最小误差），例如，寻找最近的餐馆或朋友。此外，利用用户的历史位置，该机制还可以根据用户的移动模式和朋友的兴趣做出个性化的基于位置的推荐。 该项目有望对移动的用户实现具有隐私保护的基于位置的应用程序产生更广泛的影响。