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In the past few decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the boundary between public and private information. The application of information technology and electronic communications allow service providers (businesses) to collect a large amount of data. However, this ``data collection" process can put the privacy of users at

In the past few decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the boundary between public and private information. The application of information technology and electronic communications allow service providers (businesses) to collect a large amount of data. However, this ``data collection" process can put the privacy of users at risk and also lead to user reluctance in accepting services or sharing data. This dissertation first investigates privacy sensitive consumer-retailers/service providers interactions under different scenarios, and then focuses on a unified framework for various information-theoretic privacy and privacy mechanisms that can be learned directly from data.

Existing approaches such as differential privacy or information-theoretic privacy try to quantify privacy risk but do not capture the subjective experience and heterogeneous expression of privacy-sensitivity. The first part of this dissertation introduces models to study consumer-retailer interaction problems and to better understand how retailers/service providers can balance their revenue objectives while being sensitive to user privacy concerns. This dissertation considers the following three scenarios: (i) the consumer-retailer interaction via personalized advertisements; (ii) incentive mechanisms that electrical utility providers need to offer for privacy sensitive consumers with alternative energy sources; (iii) the market viability of offering privacy guaranteed free online services. We use game-theoretic models to capture the behaviors of both consumers and retailers, and provide insights for retailers to maximize their profits when interacting with privacy sensitive consumers.

Preserving the utility of published datasets while simultaneously providing provable privacy guarantees is a well-known challenge. In the second part, a novel context-aware privacy framework called generative adversarial privacy (GAP) is introduced. Inspired by recent advancements in generative adversarial networks, GAP allows the data holder to learn the privatization mechanism directly from the data. Under GAP, finding the optimal privacy mechanism is formulated as a constrained minimax game between a privatizer and an adversary. For appropriately chosen adversarial loss functions, GAP provides privacy guarantees against strong information-theoretic adversaries. Both synthetic and real-world datasets are used to show that GAP can greatly reduce the adversary's capability of inferring private information at a small cost of distorting the data.
ContributorsHuang, Chong (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Nedich, Angelia (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of modern world. For one thing, they are becoming ubiquitous in daily life. For the other thing, they are storing more and more data, including sensitive data. Therefore, security and privacy of mobile devices are indispensable. This dissertation consists of five parts: two

Mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of modern world. For one thing, they are becoming ubiquitous in daily life. For the other thing, they are storing more and more data, including sensitive data. Therefore, security and privacy of mobile devices are indispensable. This dissertation consists of five parts: two authentication schemes, two attacks, and one countermeasure related to security and privacy of mobile devices.

Specifically, in Chapter 1, I give an overview the challenges and existing solutions in these areas. In Chapter 2, a novel authentication scheme is presented, which is based on a user’s tapping or sliding on the touchscreen of a mobile device. In Chapter 3, I focus on mobile app fingerprinting and propose a method based on analyzing the power profiles of targeted mobile devices. In Chapter 4, I mainly explore a novel liveness detection method for face authentication on mobile devices. In Chapter 5, I investigate a novel keystroke inference attack on mobile devices based on user eye movements. In Chapter 6, a novel authentication scheme is proposed, based on detecting a user’s finger gesture through acoustic sensing. In Chapter 7, I discuss the future work.
ContributorsChen, Yimin (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Microblogging services such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, and Tumblr have been emerging and deeply embedded into people's daily lives. Used by hundreds of millions of users to connect the people worldwide and share and access information in real-time, the microblogging service has also became the target of malicious attackers due

Microblogging services such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, and Tumblr have been emerging and deeply embedded into people's daily lives. Used by hundreds of millions of users to connect the people worldwide and share and access information in real-time, the microblogging service has also became the target of malicious attackers due to its massive user engagement and structural openness. Although existed, little is still known in the community about new types of vulnerabilities in current microblogging services which could be leveraged by the intelligence-evolving attackers, and more importantly, the corresponding defenses that could prevent both the users and the microblogging service providers from being attacked. This dissertation aims to uncover a number of challenging security and privacy issues in microblogging services and also propose corresponding defenses.

This dissertation makes fivefold contributions. The first part presents the social botnet, a group of collaborative social bots under the control of a single botmaster, demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of exploiting a social botnet for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation, and propose the corresponding countermeasures and evaluate their effectiveness. Inspired by Pagerank, the second part describes TrueTop, the first sybil-resilient system to find the top-K influential users in microblogging services with very accurate results and strong resilience to sybil attacks. TrueTop has been implemented to handle millions of nodes and 100 times more edges on commodity computers. The third and fourth part demonstrate that microblogging systems' structural openness and users' carelessness could disclose the later's sensitive information such as home city and age. LocInfer, a novel and lightweight system, is presented to uncover the majority of the users in any metropolitan area; the dissertation also proposes MAIF, a novel machine learning framework that leverages public content and interaction information in microblogging services to infer users' hidden ages. Finally, the dissertation proposes the first privacy-preserving social media publishing framework to let the microblogging service providers publish their data to any third-party without disclosing users' privacy and meanwhile meeting the data's commercial utilities. This dissertation sheds the light on the state-of-the-art security and privacy issues in the microblogging services.
ContributorsZhang, Jinxue (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Data privacy is emerging as one of the most serious concerns of big data analytics, particularly with the growing use of personal data and the ever-improving capability of data analysis. This dissertation first investigates the relation between different privacy notions, and then puts the main focus on developing economic foundations

Data privacy is emerging as one of the most serious concerns of big data analytics, particularly with the growing use of personal data and the ever-improving capability of data analysis. This dissertation first investigates the relation between different privacy notions, and then puts the main focus on developing economic foundations for a market model of trading private data.

The first part characterizes differential privacy, identifiability and mutual-information privacy by their privacy--distortion functions, which is the optimal achievable privacy level as a function of the maximum allowable distortion. The results show that these notions are fundamentally related and exhibit certain consistency: (1) The gap between the privacy--distortion functions of identifiability and differential privacy is upper bounded by a constant determined by the prior. (2) Identifiability and mutual-information privacy share the same optimal mechanism. (3) The mutual-information optimal mechanism satisfies differential privacy with a level at most a constant away from the optimal level.

The second part studies a market model of trading private data, where a data collector purchases private data from strategic data subjects (individuals) through an incentive mechanism. The value of epsilon units of privacy is measured by the minimum payment such that an individual's equilibrium strategy is to report data in an epsilon-differentially private manner. For the setting with binary private data that represents individuals' knowledge about a common underlying state, asymptotically tight lower and upper bounds on the value of privacy are established as the number of individuals becomes large, and the payment--accuracy tradeoff for learning the state is obtained. The lower bound assures the impossibility of using lower payment to buy epsilon units of privacy, and the upper bound is given by a designed reward mechanism. When the individuals' valuations of privacy are unknown to the data collector, mechanisms with possible negative payments (aiming to penalize individuals with "unacceptably" high privacy valuations) are designed to fulfill the accuracy goal and drive the total payment to zero. For the setting with binary private data following a general joint probability distribution with some symmetry, asymptotically optimal mechanisms are designed in the high data quality regime.
ContributorsWang, Weina (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Thesis advisor) / Scaglione, Anna (Committee member) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Mobile devices are penetrating everyday life. According to a recent Cisco report [10], the number of mobile connected devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, eReaders, and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) modules will hit 11.6 billion by 2021, exceeding the world's projected population at that time (7.8 billion). The rapid development of mobile

Mobile devices are penetrating everyday life. According to a recent Cisco report [10], the number of mobile connected devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, eReaders, and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) modules will hit 11.6 billion by 2021, exceeding the world's projected population at that time (7.8 billion). The rapid development of mobile devices has brought a number of emerging security and privacy issues in mobile computing. This dissertation aims to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in mobile computing.

This dissertation makes fivefold contributions. The first and second parts study the security and privacy issues in Device-to-Device communications. Specifically, the first part develops a novel scheme to enable a new way of trust relationship called spatiotemporal matching in a privacy-preserving and efficient fashion. To enhance the secure communication among mobile users, the second part proposes a game-theoretical framework to stimulate the cooperative shared secret key generation among mobile users. The third and fourth parts investigate the security and privacy issues in mobile crowdsourcing. In particular, the third part presents a secure and privacy-preserving mobile crowdsourcing system which strikes a good balance among object security, user privacy, and system efficiency. The fourth part demonstrates a differentially private distributed stream monitoring system via mobile crowdsourcing. Finally, the fifth part proposes VISIBLE, a novel video-assisted keystroke inference framework that allows an attacker to infer a tablet user's typed inputs on the touchscreen by recording and analyzing the video of the tablet backside during the user's input process. Besides, some potential countermeasures to this attack are also discussed. This dissertation sheds the light on the state-of-the-art security and privacy issues in mobile computing.
ContributorsSun, Jingchao (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017