Ad Blockers & Online Privacy: A Comparative Analysis of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET)

Online tracking mechanisms employed by internet companies for user profiling and targeted advertising raise major privacy concerns. Despite efforts to defend against these mechanisms, they continue to evolve, rendering many existing defences ineffective. This study performs a large-scale measurement of online tracking mechanisms across a large pool of websites using the OpenWPM (Open Web Privacy Measurement) platform. It systematically evaluates the effectiveness of several ad blockers and underlying Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) that are primarily used to mitigate different tracking techniques. By quantifying the strengths and limitations of these tools against modern tracking methods, the findings highlight gaps in existing privacy protections. Actionable recommendations are provided to enhance user privacy defences, guide tool developers and inform policymakers on addressing invasive online tracking practices.

Privacy and security federated reference architecture for Internet of Things

Physical objects are getting connected to the Internet at an exceptional rate,making the idea of the Internet of Things(IoT)a reality.The IoT ecosystem is evident everywhere in the form of smart homes,health care systems,wearables,connected vehicles,and industries.This has given rise to risks associated with the privacy and security of systems.Security issues and cyber attacks on IoT devices may potentially hinder the growth of IoT products due to deficiencies in the architecture.To counter these issues,we need to implement privacy and security right from the building blocks of IoT.The IoT architecture has evolved over the years,improving the stack of architecture with new solutions such as scalability,management,interoperability,and extensibility.This emphasizes the need to standardize and organize the IoT reference architecture in federation with privacy and security concerns.In this study,we examine and analyze 12 existing IoT reference architectures to identify their shortcomings on the basis of the requirements addressed in the standards.We propose an architecture,the privacy-federated IoT security reference architecture(PF-IoT-SRA),which interprets all the involved privacy metrics and counters major threats and attacks in the IoT communication environment.It is a step toward the standardization of the domain architecture.We effectively validate our proposed reference architecture using the architecture trade-off analysis method(ATAM),an industry-recognized scenario-based approach.

Private membership test protocol with low communication complexity

We introduce a practical method to perform private membership tests.In this method,clients are able to test whether an item is in a set controlled by the server without revealing their query item to the server.After executing the queries,the content of the server's set remains secret.One use case for a private membership test is to check whether a file contains any malware by checking its signature against a database of malware samples in a privacy-preserving way.We apply the Bloom filter and the Cuckoo filter in the membership test procedure.In order to achieve privacy properties,we present a novel protocol based on some homomorphic encryption schemes.In our protocol,we rearrange the data in the set into N-dimensional hypercubes.We have implemented our method in a realistic scenario where a client of an anti-malware company wants to privately check whether a hash value of a given file is in the malware database of the company.The evaluation shows that our method is feasible for real-world applications.We also have tested the performance of our protocol for databases of different sizes and data structures with different dimensions:2-dimensional,3-dimensional,and 4-dimensional hypercubes.We present formulas to estimate the cost of computation and communication in our protocol.

Efficient Privacy Enhanced Software Registration with ID-Based Blind Signatures

In existing software registration schemes, the privacy of users is not taken into account and may be in the risks of abuses. In this paper, we proposed a novel software registration system which can greatly reduce unauthorized use of software while keeping the privacy of users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that the privacy of users is guaranteed in software registration. Our system enjoys a modular design and can be implemented by any secure ID-based partially blind signature scheme. Furthermore, the proposal allows flexible registration information definition. This feature makes our scheme flexible and practical for more software registration applications.