Title
An efficient privacy-preserving system for monitoring mobile users: making searchable encryption practical
Abstract
Monitoring location updates from mobile users has important applications in several areas, ranging from public safety and national security to social networks and advertising. However, sensitive information can be derived from movement patterns, so protecting the privacy of mobile users is a major concern. Users may only be willing to disclose their locations when some condition is met, for instance in proximity of a disaster area, or when an event of interest occurs nearby. Currently, such functionality is achieved using searchable encryption. Such cryptographic primitives provide provable guarantees for privacy, and allow decryption only when the location satisfies some predicate. Nevertheless, they rely on expensive pairing-based cryptography (PBC), and direct application to the domain of location updates leads to impractical solutions. We propose secure and efficient techniques for private processing of location updates that complement the use of PBC and lead to significant gains in performance by reducing the amount of required pairing operations. We also implement two optimizations that further improve performance: materialization of results to expensive mathematical operations, and parallelization. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly improve performance compared to the baseline, and reduce the searchable encryption overhead to a level that is practical in a computing environment with reasonable resources, such as the cloud.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2557547.2557559
CODASPY
Keywords
Field
DocType
searchable encryption overhead,mobile user,expensive pairing-based cryptography,expensive mathematical operation,monitoring location updates,cryptographic primitive,direct application,efficient privacy-preserving system,searchable encryption,location updates,computing environment,pairing based cryptography
Internet privacy,Pairing-based cryptography,Computer security,Cryptography,Computer science,Encryption,Cryptographic primitive,Ranging,Information sensitivity,Disaster area,Cloud computing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.38
27
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gabriel Ghinita1196487.44
Razvan Rughinis22513.70