Title
Big brother knows your friends: on privacy of social communities in pervasive networks
Abstract
Wireless network operators increasingly deploy WiFi hotspots and low-power, low-range base stations in order to satisfy users' growing demands for context-aware services and performance. In addition to providing better service, such capillary infrastructure deployment threatens users' privacy with respect to their social ties and communities, as it allows infrastructure owners to infer users' daily social encounters with increasing accuracy, much to the detriment of their privacy. Yet, to date, there are no evaluations of the privacy of communities in pervasive wireless networks. In this paper, we address the important issue of privacy in pervasive communities by experimentally evaluating the accuracy of an adversary-owned set of wireless sniffing stations in reconstructing the communities of mobile users. During a four-month trial, 80 participants carried mobile devices and were eavesdropped on by an adversarial wireless mesh network on a university campus. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that focuses on the privacy of communities in a deployed pervasive network and provides important empirical evidence on the accuracy and feasibility of community tracking in such networks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/978-3-642-31205-2_23
Pervasive
Keywords
Field
DocType
pervasive network,important issue,pervasive wireless network,daily social encounter,capillary infrastructure deployment,pervasive community,big brother,infrastructure owner,wireless network operator,adversarial wireless mesh network,important empirical evidence,social community,privacy
Wireless network,Base station,Internet privacy,Wireless,Computer security,Computer science,Computer network,Mobile device,Wireless mesh network,Information privacy,Privacy software,Interpersonal ties
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.43
20
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Igor Bilogrevic119513.82
Murtuza Jadliwala226625.26
István Lám350.43
Imad Aad41150104.13
Philip Ginzboorg523923.87
Valtteri Niemi633142.03
Laurent Bindschaedler7834.09
J. -P. Hubaux810006772.23