An official website of the United States government
The increased use of smart home devices (SHDs) on short- term rental (STR) properties raises privacy concerns for guests. While previous literature identifies guests’ privacy concerns and the need to negotiate guests’ privacy prefer- ences with hosts, there is a lack of research from the hosts’ perspectives. This paper investigates if and how hosts con- sider guests’ privacy when using their SHDs on their STRs, to understand hosts’ willingness to accommodate guests’ pri- vacy concerns, a starting point for negotiation. We conducted online interviews with 15 STR hosts (e.g., Airbnb/Vrbo), find- ing that they generally use, manage, and disclose their SHDs in ways that protect guests’ privacy. However, hosts’ prac- tices fell short of their intentions because of competing needs and goals (i.e., protecting their property versus protecting guests’ privacy). Findings also highlight that hosts do not have proper support from the platforms on how to navigate these competing goals. Therefore, we discuss how to improve platforms’ guidelines/policies to prevent and resolve conflicts with guests and measures to increase engagement from both sides to set ground for negotiation.
more »
« less
A privacy-preserving networked hospitality service with the bitcoin blockchain
In recent years, we have witnessed a rise in the popularity of net- worked hospitality services (NHSs), an online marketplace for short-term peer- to-peer accommodations. Such systems, however, raise significant privacy con- cerns, because service providers such as Airbnb and 9flats can easily collect the precise and personal information of millions of participating hosts and guests through their centralized online platforms. In this paper, we propose PrivateNH, a privacy-enhancing and practical solution that offers anonymity and accountabil- ity for NHS users without relying on any trusted third party. PrivateNH leverages the recent progress of Bitcoin techniques such as Colored Coins and CoinShuffle to generate and maintain anonymous credentials for NHS participants. The cre- dential holders (NHS hosts or guests) can then lease or rent short-term lodging and interact with the service provider in an anonymous and accountable man- ner. An anonymous and secure reputation system is also introduced to establish the trust between unfamiliar hosts and guests in a peer-to-peer fashion. The pro- posed scheme is compatible with the current Bitcoin blockchain system, and its effectiveness and feasibility in NHS scenario are also demonstrated by security analysis and performance evaluation.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1722791
- PAR ID:
- 10072663
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The 13th International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Recent studies have shown that compromising Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network is an effective way to disrupt the Bitcoin service. While many attack vectors have been uncovered such as BGP hijacking in the network layer and eclipse attack in the application layer, one significant attack vector that resides in the transport layer is largely overlooked. In this paper, we investigate the TCP vulnerabilities of the Bitcoin system and their consequences. We present Bijack, an off-path TCP hijacking attack on the Bitcoin network that is able to terminate Bitcoin connections or inject malicious data into the connections with only a few prior requirements and a limited amount of knowledge. This results in the Bitcoin network topology leakage, and the Bitcoin nodes isolation.more » « less
-
Anonymity can enable both healthy online interactions like support-seeking and toxic behaviors like hate speech. How do online service providers balance these threats and opportunities? This two-part qualitative study examines the challenges perceived by open collaboration service providers in allowing anonymous contributions to their projects. We interviewed eleven people familiar with organizational decisions related to privacy and security at five open collaboration projects and followed up with an analysis of public discussions about anonymous contribution to Wikipedia. We contrast our findings with prior work on threats perceived by project volunteers and explore misalignment between policies aiming to serve contributors and the privacy practices of contributors themselves.more » « less
-
Cryptocurrency is designed for anonymous financial transactions to avoid centralized control, censorship, and regulations. To protect anonymity in the underlying P2P networking, Bitcoin adopts and supports anonymous routing of Tor, I2P, and CJDNS. We analyze the networking performances of these anonymous routing with the focus on their impacts on the blockchain consensus protocol. Compared to non-anonymous routing, anonymous routing adds inherent-by-design latency performance costs due to the additions of the artificial P2P relays. However, we discover that the lack of ecosystem plays an even bigger factor in the performances of the anonymous routing for cryptocurrency blockchain. I2P and CJDNS, both advancing the anonymous routing beyond Tor, in particular lack the ecosystem of sizable networking-peer participation. I2P and CJDNS thus result in the Bitcoin experiencing networking partitioning, which has traditionally been researched and studied in cryptocurrency/blockchain security. We focus on I2P and Tor and compare them with the non-anonymous routing because CJDNS has no active public peers resulting in no connectivity. Tor results in slow propagation while I2P yields soft partition, which is a partition effect long enough to have a substantial impact in the PoW mining. To better study and identify the latency and the ecosystem factors of the cryptocurrency networking and consensus costs, we study the behaviors both in the connection manager (directly involved in the P2P networking) and the address manager (informing the connection manager of the peer selections on the backend). This paper presents our analyses results to inform the state of cryptocurrency blockchain with anonymous routing and discusses future work directions and recommendations to resolve the performance and partition issues.more » « less
-
With the growing need for privacy and self-sovereign identity, traditional identity management relying on centralized data registries not only represents single points of failure but also lacks transparency and control over users’ identity information. With the built-in tamper-proofness and transparency, blockchain has been widely studied to accommodate the challenges in traditional identity management. Still, it usually comes with privacy concerns due to its public accessibility. Anonymous credentials take advantage of the recent progress in zero-knowledge proof, allowing the unlinkable presentation of only the necessary attributes for a service to guarantee anonymity. However, the existing anonymous credentials require a secondary issuer to verify and manage the anonymized credentials, which compromises the overall transparency and causes indirect management of the user’s identity. In this paper, we propose GrAC, a blockchain-based identity management system based on a novel identity graph, which allows users and identity providers to securely store and manage identity information on the blockchain without intermediate entities. GrAC also includes an anonymous authentication protocol suite based on zero-knowledge proof, allowing users to generate one-time anonymous credentials that selectively reveal minimal information to the service provider for authentication. The analysis and evaluations show that GrAC has a reasonable overhead and provides adequate anonymity protection while removing the need for intermediate issuers.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94268-1_57
