Identities are present in the interactions between individuals and organizations. Online shopping requires credit card information, while e-government services require social security or passport numbers. The involvement of identities, however, makes them susceptible to theft and misuse. The most prominent approach for maintaining the privacy of individuals is the enforcement of privacy policies that regulate the flow and use of identity information. This approach suffers two drawbacks that severely limit its effectiveness. First, recent research in data-mining facilitates the fusion of partial identities into complete identities. That holds true even if the attributes examined are not, normally considered, to be identifying. Second, policies are prone to human error, allowing for identity information to be released accidentally. This thesis presents a system that enables an individual to interact with organizations, without allowing these organizations to link the interactions of that individual together. The system does not release individuals' identities to organizations. Instead, certified artificial identities are used to guarantee that individuals possess the required attributes to successfully participate in the interactions. The system limits the fusion of partial identities and minimizes the effects of human error. The concept of using certified artificial identities has been extensively researched. The system, however, tackles several unaddressed scenarios. The system works not only for interactions that involve an individual and an organization, but also for interactions that involve a set of individuals connected by structured relations. The individuals should prove the existence of relations among them to organizations, yet organizations cannot profile the actions of these individuals. Further, the system allows organizations to be anonymous, while proving their attributes to individuals. Reputation-based trust is incorporated to help individuals make informed decisions whether to deal with a particular organization. The system is used to design applications in e-commerce, access control, reputation management, and cloud computing. The thesis describes the applications in detail. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-07 11:17:37.68

Informational privacy of individuals has significantly gained importance after information technology has become widely deployed. Data, once digitalised, can be copied, distributed, and long-term stored at negligible costs. This has dramatic consequences for individuals that leave traces in the form of personal data whenever they interact with information technology, for instance, computers and phones; or even when information technology is recording the personal data of aware or unaware individuals. The right of individuals for informational privacy, in particular to control the flow and use of their personal data, is easily undermined by those controlling the information technology. The objective of this thesis is to study the measurement of informational privacy with a particular focus on scenarios where an individual discloses personal data to a second party which uses this data for re-identifying the individual within a set of other individuals. We contribute with privacy metrics for several instances of this scenario in the publications included in this thesis, most notably one which adds a time dimension to the scenario for modelling the effects of the time passed between data disclosure and usage. The result is a new framework for inter-temporal privacy metrics.

Informational privacy of individuals has significantly gained importance after information technology has become widely deployed. Data, once digitalised, can be copied and distributed at negligible costs. This has dramatic consequences for individuals that leave traces in form of personal data whenever they interact with information technology. The right of individuals for informational privacy, in particular to control the flow and use of their personal data, is easily undermined by those controlling the information technology. The objective of this thesis is the measurement of informational privacy with a particular focus on scenarios where an individual discloses personal data to a second party, the data controller, which uses this data for re-identifying the individual within a set of others, the population. Several instances of this scenario are discussed in the appended papers, most notably one which adds a time dimension to the scenario for modelling the effects of the time passed between data disclosure and usage. This extended scenario leads to a new framework for inter-temporal privacy metrics. The common dilemma of all privacy metrics is their dependence on the information available to the data controller. The same information may or may not be available to the individual and, as a consequence, the individual may be misguided in his decisions due to his limited access to the data controller’s information when using privacy metrics. The goal of this thesis is thus not only the specification of new privacy metrics, but also the contribution of ideas for mitigating this dilemma. However a solution will rather be a combination of technological, economical and legal means than a purely technical solution.

Efforts towards standardization of Vehicular Communication Systems (VCSs) have been conclusive on the use of Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) for the establishment of trust among network participants. Employing VPKI in Vehicular Communication (VC) guarantees the integrity and authenticity of Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs) and Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENMs). It also offers a level of privacy for vehicles as VPKI provides them with a set of non-linkable short-lived certificates, called pseudonyms, which are used to sign outgoing messages by vehicles while they communicate with other vehicles referred to as Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) or Roadside Units (RSUs) referred to as Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I). Each vehicle uses a pseudonym for its lifetime and by switching to a not- previously- used pseudonym, it continues to communicate without risking its privacy. There have been two approaches suggested by the literature on how to provide vehicles with pseudonyms. One is the so-called pre-loading mode, suggesting to pre-load vehicles with all pseudonyms they need, which increases the cost of revocation in case they are compromised. The other one is the on-demand mode, suggesting a real-time offering of pseudonyms by VPKI at vehicles request e.g., on starting each trip. Choosing the on-demand approach imposes a considerable burden of availability and resilience on VPKI services. In this work, we are confronting the problems regarding a large-scale deployment of an on-demand VPKI that is resilient, highly available, and dynamically scalable. In order to achieve that, by leveraging state-of-the-art tools and design paradigms, we have enhanced a VPKI system to ensure that it is capable of meeting enterprise-grade Service Level Agreement (SLA) in terms of availability, and it can also be cost-efficient as services can dynamically scale-out in the presence of high load, or possibly scale-in when facing less demand. That has been made possible by re-architecting and refactoring an existing VPKI into a cloud-native solution deployed as microservices. Towards having a reliable architecture based on distributed microservices, one of the key challenges to deal with is Sybil-based misbehavior. By exploiting Sybil-based attacks in VPKI, malicious vehicles can gain influential advantage in the system, e.g., one can affect the traffic to serve its own will. Therefore, preventing the occurrence of Sybil attacks is paramount. On the other hand, traditional approaches to stop them, often come with a performance penalty as they verify requests against a relational database which is a bottleneck of the operations. We propose a solution to address Sybil-based attacks, utilizing Redis, an in-memory data store, without compromising the system efficiency and performance considerably. Running our VPKI services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) shows that a large-scale deployment of VPKI as a Service (VPKIaaS) can be done efficiently. Conducting various stress tests against the services indicates that the VPKIaaS is capable of serving real world traffic. We have tested VPKIaaS under synthetically generated normal traffic flow and flash crowd scenarios. It has been shown that VPKIaaS managed to issue 100 pseudonyms per request, submitted by 1000 vehicles where vehicles kept asking for a new set of pseudonyms every 1 to 5 seconds. Each vehicle has been served in less than 77 milliseconds. We also demonstrate that, under a flash crowd situation, with 50000 vehicles, VPKIaaS dynamically scales out, and takes ≈192 milliseconds to serve 100 pseudonyms per request submitted by vehicles. / Ansträngningar för standardisering av Vehicular Communication Systems har varit avgörande för användandet av Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) för att etablera förtroende mellan nätverksdeltagare. Användande av VPKI i Vehicular Communication (VC) garanterar integritet och autenticitet av meddelanden. Det erbjuder ett lager av säkerhet för fordon då VPKI ger dem en mängd av icke länkbara certifikat, kallade pseudonym, som används medan de kommunicerar med andra fordon, kallat Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) eller Roadside Units (RSUs) kallat Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I). Varje fordon använder ett pseudonym under en begränsad tid och genom att byta till ett icke tidigare använt pseudonym kan det fortsätta kommunicera utan att riskera sin integritet. I litteratur har två metoder föreslagits för hur man ska ladda fordon med pseudonym de behöver. Den ena metoden det så kallade offline-läget, som proponerar att man för-laddar fordonen med alla pseudonym som det behöver vilket ökar kostnaden för revokering i fall de blir komprometterat. Den andra metoden föreslår ett on-demand tillvägagångssätt som erbjuder pseudonym via VPKI på fordonets begäran vid början av varje färd. Valet av på begäran metoden sätter en stor börda på tillgänglighet och motståndskraft av VPKI tjänster. I det här arbetet, möter vi problem med storskaliga driftsättningar av en på begäran VPKI som är motståndskraftig, har hög tillgänglighet och dynamiskt skalbarhet i syfte att uppnå dessa attribut genom att nyttja toppmoderna verktyg och designparadigmer. Vi har förbättrat ett VPKI system för att säkerställa att det är kapabelt att möta SLA:er av företagsklass gällande tillgänglighet och att det även kan vara kostnadseffektivt eftersom tjänster dynamiskt kan skala ut vid högre last eller skala ner vid lägre last. Detta har möjliggjorts genom att arkitekta om en existerande VPKI till en cloud-native lösning driftsatt som mikrotjänster. En av nyckelutmaningarna till att ha en pålitlig arkitektur baserad på distribuerade mikrotjänster är sybil-baserad missuppförande. Genom att utnyttja Sybil baserade attacker på VPKI, kan illvilliga fordon påverka trafik att tjäna dess egna syften. Därför är det av största vikt att förhindra Sybil attacker. Å andra sidan så dras traditionella metoder att stoppa dem med prestandakostnader. Vi föreslår en lösning för att adressera Sybilbaserade attacker genom att nyttja Redis, en in-memory data-store utan att märkbart kompromissa på systemets effektivitet och prestanda. Att köra våra VPKI tjänster på Google Cloud Platform (GCP) och genomföra diverse stresstester mot dessa har visat att storskaliga driftsättningar av VPKI as a Service (VPKIaaS) kan göras effektivt samtidigt som riktigt trafik hanteras. Vi har testat VPKIaaS under syntetisk genererat normalt trafikflöde samt flow och flash mängd scenarier. Det har visat sig att VPKIaaS klarar att utfärda 100 pseudonym per förfråga utsänt av 1000 fordon (där fordonen bad om en ny uppsättning pseudonym varje 1 till 5 sekunder), och varje fordon fått svar inom 77 millisekunder. Vi demonstrerar även att under en flashcrowd situation, där antalet fordon höjs till 50000 med en kläckningsgrad på 100. VPKIaaS dynamiskt skalar ut och tar ≈192 millisekunder att betjäna 100 pseudonymer per förfrågan gjord av fordon.