Matching Items (409)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

153374-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Users often join an online social networking (OSN) site, like Facebook, to remain social, by either staying connected with friends or expanding social networks. On an OSN site, users generally share variety of personal information which is often expected to be visible to their friends, but sometimes vulnerable to

Users often join an online social networking (OSN) site, like Facebook, to remain social, by either staying connected with friends or expanding social networks. On an OSN site, users generally share variety of personal information which is often expected to be visible to their friends, but sometimes vulnerable to unwarranted access from others. The recent study suggests that many personal attributes, including religious and political affiliations, sexual orientation, relationship status, age, and gender, are predictable using users' personal data from an OSN site. The majority of users want to remain socially active, and protect their personal data at the same time. This tension leads to a user's vulnerability, allowing privacy attacks which can cause physical and emotional distress to a user, sometimes with dire consequences. For example, stalkers can make use of personal information available on an OSN site to their personal gain. This dissertation aims to systematically study a user vulnerability against such privacy attacks.

A user vulnerability can be managed in three steps: (1) identifying, (2) measuring and (3) reducing a user vulnerability. Researchers have long been identifying vulnerabilities arising from user's personal data, including user names, demographic attributes, lists of friends, wall posts and associated interactions, multimedia data such as photos, audios and videos, and tagging of friends. Hence, this research first proposes a way to measure and reduce a user vulnerability to protect such personal data. This dissertation also proposes an algorithm to minimize a user's vulnerability while maximizing their social utility values.

To address these vulnerability concerns, social networking sites like Facebook usually let their users to adjust their profile settings so as to make some of their data invisible. However, users sometimes interact with others using unprotected posts (e.g., posts from a ``Facebook page\footnote{The term ''Facebook page`` refers to the page which are commonly dedicated for businesses, brands and organizations to share their stories and connect with people.}''). Such interactions help users to become more social and are publicly accessible to everyone. Thus, visibilities of these interactions are beyond the control of their profile settings. I explore such unprotected interactions so that users' are well aware of these new vulnerabilities and adopt measures to mitigate them further. In particular, {\em are users' personal attributes predictable using only the unprotected interactions}? To answer this question, I address a novel problem of predictability of users' personal attributes with unprotected interactions. The extreme sparsity patterns in users' unprotected interactions pose a serious challenge. Therefore, I approach to mitigating the data sparsity challenge by designing a novel attribute prediction framework using only the unprotected interactions. Experimental results on Facebook dataset demonstrates that the proposed framework can predict users' personal attributes.
ContributorsGundecha, Pritam S (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Barbier, Geoffrey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
154606-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Data protection has long been a point of contention and a vastly researched field. With the advent of technology and advances in Internet technologies, securing data has become much more challenging these days. Cloud services have become very popular. Given the ease of access and availability of the systems, it

Data protection has long been a point of contention and a vastly researched field. With the advent of technology and advances in Internet technologies, securing data has become much more challenging these days. Cloud services have become very popular. Given the ease of access and availability of the systems, it is not easy to not use cloud to store data. This however, pose a significant risk to data security as more of your data is available to a third party. Given the easy transmission and almost infinite storage of data, securing one's sensitive information has become a major challenge.

Cloud service providers may not be trusted completely with your data. It is not very uncommon to snoop over the data for finding interesting patterns to generate ad revenue or divulge your information to a third party, e.g. government and law enforcing agencies. For enterprises who use cloud service, it pose a risk for their intellectual property and business secrets. With more and more employees using cloud for their day to day work, business now face a risk of losing or leaking out information.

In this thesis, I have focused on ways to protect data and information over cloud- a third party not authorized to use your data, all this while still utilizing cloud services for transfer and availability of data. This research proposes an alternative to an on-premise secure infrastructure giving exibility to user for protecting the data and control over it. The project uses cryptography to protect data and create a secure architecture for secret key migration in order to decrypt the data securely for the intended recipient. It utilizes Intel's technology which gives it an added advantage over other existing solutions.
ContributorsSrivastava, Abhijeet (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
154767-Thumbnail Image.png
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
ContributorsEvans, Bartlett R. (Conductor) / Schildkret, David (Conductor) / Glenn, Erica (Conductor) / Concert Choir (Performer) / Chamber Singers (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-03-16
154895-Thumbnail Image.png
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
149668-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Service based software (SBS) systems are software systems consisting of services based on the service oriented architecture (SOA). Each service in SBS systems provides partial functionalities and collaborates with other services as workflows to provide the functionalities required by the systems. These services may be developed and/or owned by different

Service based software (SBS) systems are software systems consisting of services based on the service oriented architecture (SOA). Each service in SBS systems provides partial functionalities and collaborates with other services as workflows to provide the functionalities required by the systems. These services may be developed and/or owned by different entities and physically distributed across the Internet. Compared with traditional software system components which are usually specifically designed for the target systems and bound tightly, the interfaces of services and their communication protocols are standardized, which allow SBS systems to support late binding, provide better interoperability, better flexibility in dynamic business logics, and higher fault tolerance. The development process of SBS systems can be divided to three major phases: 1) SBS specification, 2) service discovery and matching, and 3) service composition and workflow execution. This dissertation focuses on the second phase, and presents a privacy preserving service discovery and ranking approach for multiple user QoS requirements. This approach helps service providers to register services and service users to search services through public, but untrusted service directories with the protection of their privacy against the service directories. The service directories can match the registered services with service requests, but do not learn any information about them. Our approach also enforces access control on services during the matching process, which prevents unauthorized users from discovering services. After the service directories match a set of services that satisfy the service users' functionality requirements, the service discovery approach presented in this dissertation further considers service users' QoS requirements in two steps. First, this approach optimizes services' QoS by making tradeoff among various QoS aspects with users' QoS requirements and preferences. Second, this approach ranks services based on how well they satisfy users' QoS requirements to help service users select the most suitable service to develop their SBSs.
ContributorsYin, Yin (Author) / Yau, Stephen S. (Thesis advisor) / Candan, Kasim (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
ContributorsOwen, Ken (Conductor) / McDevitt, Mandy L. M. (Performer) / Larson, Brook (Conductor) / Wang, Lin-Yu (Performer) / Jacobs, Todd (Performer) / Morehouse, Daniel (Performer) / Magers, Kristen (Performer) / DeGrow, Gary (Performer) / DeGrow, Richard (Performer) / Women's Chorus (Performer) / Sun Devil Singers (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2004-03-24
ContributorsMetz, John (Performer) / Sowers, Richard (Performer) / Collegium Musicum (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created1983-01-29
ContributorsEvans, Bartlett R. (Conductor) / Glenn, Erica (Conductor) / Steiner, Kieran (Conductor) / Thompson, Jason D. (Conductor) / Arizona Statesmen (Performer) / Women's Chorus (Performer) / Concert Choir (Performer) / Gospel Choir (Conductor) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2019-03-15
ContributorsKillian, George W. (Performer) / Killian, Joni (Performer) / Vocal Jazz Ensemble (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created1992-11-05