Handbook of Information Security: Threats, Vulnerabilities, Prevention, Detection, and Management, Volume 3

Cryptographic Privacy Protection Techniques

Markus Jakobsson, Indiana University, Bloomington

Introduction

Where Is Privacy Important?

Privacy of Actions

Privacy of Communicated Data

Database Privacy

Privacy of Location

Privacy Against Intrusion

Controlled Privacy

Encryption with Privacy Control

Payments with Privacy Control

Conclusion: Further Reading

Glossary

Cross References

References

INTRODUCTION

As we move toward a society with more and more information being produced and processed, privacy issues will become increasingly important to understand and address. Although much of the information in question has been available in one form or another long before the information age, it is the ease with which it can be collected and processed—and the amount of it that can be obtained—that poses a threat to privacy. The threats to a person's or company's privacy are numerous and not always easy to anticipate without careful analysis. This chapter strives to describe and exemplify potential privacy threats to clarify what types of threats might be avoided by means of legislation and what types of threats appear better to counter by means of technology. Examples of possible techniques are given. This chapter also describes when privacy (as opposed to the lack thereof) may become a threat to society and how this may be addressed.

An example of a privacy threat is traffic analysis. This is the term used to refer to determining who is interacting with whom. Clearly, at a time when all ...