arXiv subjects

Chandra Sharma

Publications and source records attributed to Chandra Sharma.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

The Economics of Privacy and Utility: Investment Strategies

The inevitable leakage of privacy as a result of unrestrained disclosure of personal information has motivated extensive research on robust privacy-preserving mechanisms. However, existing research is mostly limited to solving the problem in a static setting with disregard for the privacy leakage over time. Unfortunately, this treatment of privacy is insufficient in practical settings where users continuously disclose their personal information over time resulting in an accumulated leakage of the users' sensitive information. In this paper, we consider privacy leakage over a finite time horizon and investigate optimal strategies to maximize the utility of the disclosed data while limiting the finite-horizon privacy leakage. We consider a simple privacy mechanism that involves compressing the user's data before each disclosure to meet the desired constraint on future privacy. We further motivate several algorithms to optimize the dynamic privacy-utility tradeoff and evaluate their performance via extensive synthetic performance tests.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

A Practical Approach to Navigating the Tradeoff Between Privacy and Precise Utility

Due to the recent popularity of online social networks, coupled with people's propensity to disclose personal information in an effort to achieve certain gratifications, the problem of navigating the tradeoff between privacy and utility attracted a lot of recent interest and generated a rich body of research. A critical prerequisite to solving the problem is to appropriately capture the privacy and the utility aspects in the problem formulation. Most of the existing works' focus is on the notion of privacy, while utility loss is often treated as the undesirable but necessary distortion of the true data, introduced by the privacy mechanism. By contrast, we are interested in modelling utility differently, by associating it with specific attributes of a user, just like privacy is associated with specific private attributes in the literature. Our model of utility facilitates a better and more precise privacy mechanism, and achieves better privacy-utility tradeoffs. We further incorporate into our problem formulation a practical constraint on acceptable loss in utility per unit gain in privacy, which allows users to customize the privacy mechanisms in order to account for the relative values that each user associates with their own privacy and utility. This paper discusses the intricacies of our utility model and the corresponding privacy-utility tradeoff, and introduces a heuristic greedy algorithm to solve the problem.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Review of the Security of Backward-Compatible Automotive Inter-ECU Communication

Advanced electronic units inside modern vehicles have enhanced the driving experience, but also introduced a myriad of security problems due to the inherent limitations of the internal communication protocol. In the last two decades, a number of security threats have been identified and accordingly, security measures have been proposed. While a large body of research on the vehicular security domain is focused on exposing vulnerabilities and proposing counter measures, there is an apparent paucity of research aimed at reviewing existing works on automotive security and at extracting insights. This paper provides a systematic review of security threats and countermeasures for the ubiquitous CAN bus communication protocol. It further exposes the limitations of the existing security measures, and discusses a seemingly-overlooked, simple, cost-effective and incrementally deployable solution which can provide a reasonable defense against a major class of packet injection attacks and many denial of service attacks.

cs.CR↗