Your personal data in a box!

By Hamed Haddadi @realhamed
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~hamed/


Today's personal data ecosystem is in a fragile state. A large number of smartphone apps [1], third party trackers [2], or social media collect and aggregate personal information in order to provide location-based services or targeted advertising. This comes with several costs, including our privacy, energy, and bandwidth use. However, any attempts to reduce these costs that are in opposition to the basic economics of so many Internet services are unlikely to succeed. Likewise, personal data vaults and information silos are bound to become a target for security attacks.

In a new EPSRC-funded project, we are building the Databox [3], a personal networked device (and associated services) that collates and mediates access to personal and IoT data, allowing us to recover control of our online lives. The Databox is a first step to re-balancing power between us, the data subjects, and the corporations that collect and use our data.

In the Databox Project, starting from October 2016, the researchers are creating a hardware platform and an open source suite of software for bringing third party apps to personal data, without jeopardising individuals' privacy. This can be achieved by performing analytics over encrypted data [4] a first level of aggregation and data analysis at the user end, or in a distributed manner over the boxes in the community [5]. While the Databox is not a data silo, it allows the user to interact with their data using concepts inherited from the Human-Data Interaction framework, and install and verified authorised third party apps which have isolated and controlled access to different data sources.

One might think, what would we put our data together? What's in it for the user? Where's the business model? The way to think about it is the Android or iOS ecosystem, where the inherent value lies within the apps and the data, while in the Databox model, users might actually be tempted to pay for an app that does, say for example, income and expenditure analysis for getting the best mortgage, or mental and physical health analysis without giving up all their personal data and smartphone battery life. The app ecosystem is only limited by the developers' imagination and the users' needs.

Research in this space is the first step to fighting the privacy battle. The complex regulatory aspects over acquisition and trade of personal data, and various geographical jurisdictions surrounding [or lack there of] personal data all make for a challenging and bumpy road ahead. What is certain, is that the current wild-west nature of personal data can not continue for much longer.

[1] How Private Are Health-Tracking Apps on Your Phone?,
http://health.usnews.com/wellness/articles/2016-07-13/how-private-are-health-tracking-apps-on-your-phone

[2] The Murky World of Third Party Web Tracking, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530741/the-murky-world-of-third-party-web-tracking/

[3] Hamed Haddadi, Heidi Howard, Amir Chaudhry, Jon Crowcroft, Anil Madhavapeddy, Derek McAuley, Richard Mortier, "Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box”, The 5th decennial Aarhus conference (Aarhus 2015), August 2015

[4] Wang, Frank, James Mickens, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Vinod Vaikuntanathan. "Sieve: cryptographically enforced access control for user data in untrusted clouds." In 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16), 2016.

[5] Hamed Haddadi, Richard Mortier, Steven Hand, Ian Brown, Eiko Yoneki, Derek McAuley and Jon Crowcroft: “Privacy Analytics”. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, April 2012.

Our response to VPN providers' request & reactions

We have had a lot of interest in some of our recent work: “A Glance through the VPN Looking Glass: IPv6 Leakage and DNS Hijacking in Commercial VPN Clients”, which has just been published at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Philadelphia. We’re delighted this has made a positive impact, with many VPNs announcing fixes to deal with the issues we raised and notified them all months before publishing the paper. However, we wanted to add a few extra comments in light of the statements made in recent days.

A few of the VPN providers say that our paper is out-of-date and they have deployed fixes. This is great news to hear, and something that we were obviously hoping for. We were fastidious about contacting all VPN providers before publication to give them the opportunity to deploy their fixes before the results were made public. In many cases, the VPN providers have explicitly acknowledged us as being responsible for them deploying the fix. Upon contacting them, some of the companies ignored our mail. We therefore refute claims that we were irresponsible in the disclosure of this work - any VPNs who remain vulnerable are solely responsible for their own infrastructure and the privacy and security of their customers.

We’ve been contacted by several VPNs that we did not include in the study. Further, some of the VPNs that we did study have dismissed our findings, stating that they are not vulnerable. Whereas some have now deployed fixes, we are exceedingly confident in the veracity of the experiments prior to this. We also want to thank the VPNs that came out and acknowledged our work as being accurate, rather than denying it. One way in which companies have claimed our experiments are wrong is by saying that the number of exit points we reported were incorrect. This is misleading. We were explicit in saying that these numbers were those observed by our vantage point. We never claimed to have a comprehensive view over all their exit points. Further, this in no way relates to the security attacks discussed, so it is rather irrelevant. Sadly, we cannot continue to repeatedly test all the VPNs contacting us as we simply don’t have the manpower. However, we encourage all VPNs to repeat the tests detailed in the paper, and to deploy fixes if the vulnerabilities are found.

Lastly, we want to emphasise the key point of our study: VPNs are not designed to give comprehensive anonymity. We were glad to see that some of companies were very candid about this, and publicly spoke of the benefits of Tor and the limitations of anonymity capabilities offered by a VPN. If you are genuinely concerned about your online privacy, then a service such as Tor is more appropriate. If you simply want to gain an IP address in another country then, sure, a VPN is perfectly suitable.

Source:

Vasile Claudiu Perta, Marco Valerio Barbera, Gareth Tyson, Hamed Haddadi, Alessandro Mei, "A Glance through the VPN Looking Glass: IPv6 Leakage and DNS Hijacking in Commercial VPN clients”,  The 15th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2015), June 30 – July 2, 2015, Philadelphia, PA, USA (paper, HackerNews, The Register, Tech times).

Privacy-preserving Adsense Systems Using Delay Tolerant Networking

an undergrad student of mine did this work based on our research on MobiAd, which I found pretty impressive!



With the ever-increasing number of smart phones, a growing num- bers of people view advertisements on their phones and hence the smart phone advertising market has become rich and noticeable. To raise click-through rate and maximize profit, ad brokers ensure their ads are more personalized and targeted. Therefore, they col- lect personal information to build an accurate user profile. The use of sensitive and personal information may raise privacy concerns. In this paper we focus using Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) to anonymize click reports, aiming to stop attackers tracking and identifying users based on behaviour and location. The results of our simulations prove that a few-hop DTN-based system can protect users’ identity and privacy while not heavily increasing their energy costs.

http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~hamed/papers/advdtn.pdf

Individual's perception of the value of privacy, a contextual experiment.

There are a large number of studies surveying individuals about the value fo their personal information. These are particularly motivated by the claims of big cloud , good or bad, that individuals can't evaluate their personal information, so it must be free!

we recently did a survey using android apps , asking individuals to let us know twice a day, what they are doing, who they are with, and how much are these information worth to them. However we divided the individuals into 4 groups, with different buying and selling criteria..

In brief, the results show that individual's CAN evaluate the value of their personal info, and these values are in agreement with findings of others (see Vijay Erramilli's paper in WWW'13 for example or Bernardo Huberman's information market paper)

The paper is published at ACM SIGCOMM HOTPLANET 2013 workshop. you can ready it here

Bernadette Kamleitner, Stephan Dickert, Marjan Falahrastegar, Hamed Haddadi, “Information Bazaar: a Contextual Evaluation”, 5th ACM HotPlanet workshop, co-located with SIGCOMM 2013, August 2013, HongKong.

PayPal and Ebay, offshore, lawless banking service ? privacy breach and data protection act

While all the European markets are suffering, there are some businesses doing very well.. Paypal is one of them, ebay's banking arm, set up in luxembourg for tax evation purpose, sending money here and there and getting massive commissions and cuts also on ebay and many other services

they are so strong that they arrogantly refuse to provide you with your own record of the information they they have about you, simply because they are not a UK-based company so they don't have to abide by UK regulations..

the only way is not to use them!