The increasing tendency of using user-controlled servers for supporting different scenarios from leisure and professional life raises new security challenges. Especially when those servers are used to support collaborative scenarios (e.g., communication and sharing with others), the requirement for anonymity at the network level should be supported in an efficient way. In this paper we present a specific communication scenario that could lead to linkability even though anonymous networks are used. The requirements gathering is based on realistic requirements from the EU FP7 di.me project requiring to empower lay end-users to collaborate with their contacts. Thereby anonymity at the network level also needs to be considered in order to disguise the physical location of the users and also of their server(s). We present an approach satisfying these anonymity requirements by means of a Tor based software component in order to overcome such privacy problems. First results are presented and the portability of the suggested solution for similar settings as well as future work directions are discussed.
Nowadays, supporting social interaction and multiuser requirements with mobile applications becomes indispensable. Thereby, security and privacy are of major concern due to the frequent scandals related to misusage of end-users data or various threats such as different kinds of man-in-the-middle attacks based on inferring interaction traces. Preserving the end users' privacy, especially in mobile collaborative settings, is the most often-cited point of critique of mobile and ubiquitous computing. In this paper we present an approach empowering endusers to tailor (adapt) their mobile applications according to their privacy needs by adjusting the distributed architecture decentralisation degree also at runtime (e.g. switching among various data storage and communication servers without leaving the main social setting context). The gathering of requirements is based on lab and user trials as well as derived from accumulated experiences from various projects. We show this exemplary with the help of a prototypic mobile application to support an angling community with privacy and collaboration needs related to location-based services.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.