Doctoral Dissertations

Author

Sashi Gurung

Keywords and Phrases

Anonymization; Hadoop; Location; Privacy; Trust; VANET

Abstract

"The use of location-based services (LBS) (e.g., Intel's Thing Finder) is expanding. Besides the traditional centralized location-based services, distributed ones are also emerging due to the development of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), a dynamic network which allows vehicles to communicate with one another. Due to the nature of the need of tracking users' locations, LBS have raised increasing concerns on users' location privacy. Although many research has been carried out for users to submit their locations anonymously, the collected anonymous location data may still be mapped to individuals when the adversary has related background knowledge.

To improve location privacy, in this dissertation, the problem of anonymizing the collected location datasets is addressed so that they can be published for public use without violating any privacy concerns. Specifically, a privacy-preserving trajectory publishing algorithm is proposed that preserves high data utility rate. Moreover, the scalability issue is tackled in the case the location datasets grows gigantically due to continuous data collection as well as increase of LBS users by developing a distributed version of our trajectory publishing algorithm which leveraging the MapReduce technique.

As a consequence of users being anonymous, it becomes more challenging to evaluate the trustworthiness of messages disseminated by anonymous users. Existing research efforts are mainly focused on privacy-preserving authentication of users which helps in tracing malicious vehicles only after the damage is done. However, it is still not sufficient to prevent malicious behavior from happening in the case where attackers do not care whether they are caught later on. Therefore, it would be more effective to also evaluate the content of the message. In this dissertation, a novel information-oriented trustworthiness evaluation is presented which enables each individual user to evaluate the message content and make informed decisions"--Abstract, page iii.

Advisor(s)

Lin, Dan

Committee Member(s)

Hurson, A. R.
Madria, Sanjay Kumar
Jiang, Wei
Zawodniok, Maciej Jan, 1975-

Department(s)

Computer Science

Degree Name

Ph. D. in Computer Science

Publisher

Missouri University of Science and Technology

Publication Date

Fall 2014

Pagination

x, 96 pages

Note about bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 88-95).

Rights

© 2014 Sashi Gurung, All rights reserved.

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

File Type

text

Language

English

Subject Headings

Location-based services
Vehicular ad hoc networks (Computer networks) -- Security measures
Routing protocols (Computer network protocols)

Thesis Number

T 10608

Electronic OCLC #

902731504

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