Establishing Trust Through Anonymous and Private Information Exchange Over Personal Networks

Security and privacy in Personal Networks constitute a major challenge for designers and implementers. The deployment of novel services over a collaborative environment where users share their resources and profiles create higher demands on security and privacy requirements. In this paper, the authors address the issue of privacy-enabled, secure personal information exchange among participants of a Personal Networks federation, in order to establish trust. The paper proposes a novel model based on the separation of user ID information from personal preferences and user status information. The proposed model is able to ensure privacy through anonymity over personal data exchange, while it incorporates mechanisms for the detection and confronting of malicious behavior, and resilience against attacks. A proof of concept based on an actual implementation is provided. Further, discussion is presented on the issues that need to be tackled in order to incorporate the proposed model in a standard PN architecture.