Privacy Preserving Enforcement of Sensitive Policies in Distributed Environments
Dr. Muhammad Rizwan Asghar
CREATE-NET, Italy
Post Doc Application Talk
Muhammad Rizwan Asghar is a Researcher at CREATE-NET, Italy. In 2013, he received his Ph.D. degree in ICT (Security and Privacy) from the University of Trento, Italy. He was a Visiting Fellow at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), CA, USA from July to December 2012. In 2009, he obtained his M.Sc. degree in Information Security Technology from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands; while, he earned his B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Computer Science at PUCIT, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan in 2006. His research interests include access control, applied cryptography, security, privacy, cloud computing and distributed systems.
Opportunistic networks have recently received considerable attention from both industry and researchers. These networks can be used for many applications without the need for a dedicated IT infrastructure. In the context of opportunistic networks, the application to content sharing in particular has attracted specific attention. To support content sharing, opportunistic networks may implement a publish-subscribe system in which users may publish their own content and indicate interest in other content through subscription. Using a smartphone, any user can act as a broker by opportunistically forwarding both published content and interest within the network. Unfortunately, despite their provision of this great flexibility, opportunistic networks raise serious privacy and security issues. Untrusted brokers can not only compromise the privacy of subscribers by learning their interest but also can gain unauthorised access to the disseminated content. In the talk, we will see how to address the research challenges inherent to the exchange of content and interest without: (i) compromising the privacy of subscribers and (ii) providing unauthorised access to untrusted brokers.