Personal mobile devices are increasingly equipped with the capability to sense the physical world (through cameras, microphones, and accelerometers, for example) and the, network world (with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth interfaces). Such devices offer many new opportunities for cooperative sensing applications. For example, users' mobile phones may contribute data to community-oriented information services, from city-wide pollution monitoring to enterprise-wide detection of unauthorized Wi-Fi access points. This people-centric mobile-sensing model introduces a new security challenge in the design of mobile systems: protecting the privacy of participants while allowing their devices to reliably contribute high-quality data to these large-scale applications. We describe AnonySense, a privacy-aware architecture for realizing pervasive applications based on collaborative, opportunistic sensing by personal mobile devices. AnonySense allows applications to submit sensing tasks that will be distributed across anonymous participating mobile devices, later receiving verified, yet anonymized, sensor data reports back from the field, thus providing the first secure implementation of this participatory sensing model. We describe our trust model, and the security properties that drove the design of the AnonySense system. We evaluate our prototype implementation through experiments that indicate the feasibility of this approach, and through two applications: a Wi-Fi rogue access point detector and a lost-object finder.
Mobile health technology has great potential to increase healthcare quality, expand access to services, reduce costs, and improve personal wellness and public health. However, mHealth also raises significant privacy and security challenges.
Information technology can improve the quality, efficiency, and cost of healthcare. In this survey, we examine the privacy requirements of mobile computing technologies that have the potential to transform healthcare. Such mHealth technology enables physicians to remotely monitor patients' health and enables individuals to manage their own health more easily. Despite these advantages, privacy is essential for any personal monitoring technology. Through an extensive survey of the literature, we develop a conceptual privacy framework for mHealth, itemize the privacy properties needed in mHealth systems, and discuss the technologies that could support privacy-sensitive mHealth systems. We end with a list of open research questions.
30 October 2006 in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Location is an important feature for many applications, and wireless networks may serve their clients better by anticipating client mobility. As a result, many location predictors have been proposed in the literature, though few have been evaluated with empirical evidence. This paper reports on the results of the first extensive empirical evaluation of location predictors using a two-year trace of the mobility patterns of more than 6,000 users on Dartmouth's campus-wide Wi-Fi wireless network. The surprising results provide critical evidence for anyone designing or using mobility predictors. We implemented and compared the prediction accuracy of several location predictors drawn from four major families of domain-independent predictors, namely, Markov-based, compression-based, PPM, and SPM predictors. We found that low-order Markov predictors performed as well or better than the more complex and more space-consuming compression-based predictors
1 July 1999 in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
Use of the Internet has exploded in recent years with the appearance of the World-Wide Web. In this pa- per, we show how current technological trends may lead to a system based substantially on mobile code, and in many cases, mobile agents. We discuss several technical and non-technical hurdles along the path to that eventuality. It seems likely that, within a few years, nearly all major Internet sites will be capable of hosting and willing to host some form of mobile code or mobile agents.