CAREER:
Providing authentication and
privacy in location-based services
Supported by the National Science
Foundation
Award number:
IIS-0845262
PI:
Spiridon Bakiras
Duration:
July 2009-June 2014
Amount:
$489,161
Abstract:
The
embedding of positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) in mobile devices
facilitates the emergence of location-based services (LBS), which is
considered as the next "killer" application in the wireless data
market. Location-based services allow clients to query an LBS provider
in a ubiquitous manner, in order to retrieve detailed information about
points of interest (POIs) in their vicinity. However, for such
applications to succeed, privacy and trust are essential. To this end,
this project will focus on two separate tracks. First, due to the
increasing popularity of the database outsourcing model, the LBS
provider may not be the real owner of the data. Consequently, it must
prove to the client that (i) the data originated from the data owner
(authenticity) and (ii) the result set is correct and complete
(integrity). In this project, the PI will address the above issues, and
design efficient algorithms, based on digital signatures and public-key
cryptography, for authenticating several types of spatial queries in
outsourced databases.
Second, similar to every other online activity (e.g., web surfing,
online purchases, etc.), location-dependent queries may disclose
sensitive information about an individual's health, lifestyle, habits,
political/religious affiliations, etc. Therefore, hiding the client's
location from the LBS provider is of paramount importance for building
private mobile computing applications. The PI will utilize the
theoretical work on Private Information Retrieval (PIR) to design
efficient algorithms that support a wide range of private
location-dependent queries. The results of this research will be
applied to the effective teaching of both undergraduate and graduate
students, by (i) creating new courses on database security, and (ii)
involving undergraduate and underrepresented students in research
through a number of projects.
Students:
Konstantinos Nikolopoulos, Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, The
Graduate Center, CUNY.
Sahin Buyrukbilen, Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, The Graduate
Center, CUNY.
Bin Mu, Ph.D. student in Computer
Science, The Graduate
Center, CUNY.
Publications:
L. Hu, W.-S. Ku, S. Bakiras, and C. Shahabi, “Spatial
query
integrity with Voronoi neighbors,”
in IEEE Transactions
on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE),
to appear.
S.
Papadopoulos, S. Bakiras, and D. Papadias, “pCloud:
A
distributed system for practical PIR,”
in IEEE
Transactions on
Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC),
9(1):115-127, January 2012.
S. Bakiras and K. F. Nikolopoulos, “Adjusting
the trade-off between privacy guarantees and computational cost in
secure hardware PIR,”
in Proc.
VLDB Workshop on Secure
Data Management (SDM),
pp. 128-144, September 2011.
L.
Hu, W.-S. Ku, S. Bakiras, and C. Shahabi, “Verifying
spatial queries using Voronoi neighbors,”
in Proc.
ACM SIGSPATIAL International
Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS),
November 2010.
S.
Papadopoulos, S. Bakiras, and D. Papadias, “Nearest
neighbor
search
with strong location privacy,”
in Proc.
International Conference
on Very Large Databases (VLDB),
September 2010.
| SPIROS
BAKIRAS (PhD EE, USC) Associate Professor |
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