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Publications

Publications by Luís Filipe Antunes

2018

Evaluating the Privacy Properties of Secure VoIP Metadata

Authors
Resende, JS; Sousa, PR; Antunes, L;

Publication
TRUST, PRIVACY AND SECURITY IN DIGITAL BUSINESS

Abstract
Some governments do not consider metadata as personal data, and so not in the scope of privacy regulations. However, often, metadata gives more relevant information than the actual content itself. Metadata can be very useful to identify, locate, understand and manage personal data, i.e., information that is eminently private in nature and under most privacy regulation should be anonymized or deleted if users have not give their consent. In voice calls, we are facing a critical situation in terms of privacy, as metadata can identify who calls to whom and the duration of the call, for example. In this work, we investigate privacy properties of voice calls metadata, in particular when using secure VoIP, giving evidence of the ability to extract sensitive information from its ("secure") metadata. We find that ZRTP metadata is freely available to any client on the network, and that users can be re-identified by any user with access to the network. Also, we propose a solution for this problem, suitable for all the ZRTP-based implementations.

2018

Enforcing Privacy and Security in Public Cloud Storage

Authors
Resende, JS; Martins, R; Antunes, L;

Publication
2018 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON PRIVACY, SECURITY AND TRUST (PST)

Abstract
Cloud storage allows users to remotely store their data, giving access anywhere and to anyone with an Internet connection. The accessibility, lack of local data maintenance and absence of local storage hardware are the main advantages of this type of storage. The adoption of this type of storage is being driven by its accessibility. However, one of the main barriers to its widespread adoption is the sovereignty issues originated by lack of trust in storing private and sensitive information in such a medium. Recent attacks to cloud-based storage show that current solutions do not provide adequate levels of security and subsequently fail to protect users' privacy. Usually, users rely solely on the security supplied by the storage providers, which in the presence of a security breach will ultimate lead to data leakage. In this paper, we propose and implement a broker (ARGUS) that acts as a proxy to the existing public cloud infrastructures by performing all the necessary authentication, cryptography and erasure coding. ARGUS uses erasure code as a way to provide efficient redundancy (opposite to standard replication) while adding an extra layer to data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces that are stored across a set of different storage providers (public or private). The key characteristics of ARGUS are confidentiality, integrity and availability of data stored in public cloud systems.

2019

pTASC: Trustable Autonomous Secure Communications

Authors
Sousa, PR; Cirne, A; Resende, JS; Martins, R; Antunes, L;

Publication
ICDCN '19: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2019 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND NETWORKING

Abstract
The number of devices connected to the Internet has been increasing exponentially. There is a substantial amount of data being exchanged among numerous connected devices. The added convenience brought by these devices spans across multiple facets of everyday life, such as drivers reporting an accident through dash cams, patients monitoring their own health, and companies controlling the safety of their facilities. However, it is critical to increase safety and privacy across the data generated and propagated by these devices. Previous works have focused mainly on device management and relied on centralized solutions namely Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). This paper describes a novel mechanism that ensures secure autonomous communication between Internet of Things (IoT) devices, while using a completely decentralized solution that mitigates the classical single points-of-failure problem. This is accomplished by a new peer-to-peer protocol using Short Authentication Strings (SAS), in which verification is made through a Limited-Location Channel (LLC).

2018

How-to Express Explicit and Auditable Consent

Authors
Carvalho, AC; Martins, R; Antunes, L;

Publication
2018 16TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON PRIVACY, SECURITY AND TRUST (PST)

Abstract
While the importance of consent request in today's society is increasing, specially online as a lawful basis for the processing of personal data, no detailed analysis of current technological solutions is available. In this work, we describe the existing technological solutions to express online consent in a positive fashion, including all the properties that an online solution should hold. We conclude by offering a risk proposal based on the linear combination of the rating of each one of these properties. We observe a low agreement between observers, highlighting that it is not easy to fulfill the requirements of the GDPR and showing that these studies are important when performing a Data Protection Impact Assessment. To overcome the low agreement, we propose the median of the observers' rate.

2019

OpenEHR and General Data Protection Regulation: Evaluation of Principles and Requirements

Authors
Goncalves Ferreira, D; Sousa, M; Bacelar Silva, G; Frade, S; Antunes, L; Beale, T; Cruz Correia, R;

Publication
JMIR MEDICAL INFORMATICS

Abstract
Background: Concerns about privacy and personal data protection resulted in reforms of the existing legislation in the European Union (EU). The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to reform the existing directive on the topic of personal data protection of EU citizens with a strong emphasis on more control of the citizens over their data and in the establishment of rules for the processing of personal data. OpenEHR is a standard that embodies many principles of interoperable and secure software for electronic health records (EHRs) and has been advocated as the best approach for the development of hospital information systems. Objective: This study aimed to understand to what extent the openEHR standard can help in the compliance of EHR systems to the GDPR requirements. Methods: A list of requirements for an EHR to support GDPR compliance and also a list of the openEHR design principles were made. The requirements were categorized and compared with the principles by experts on openEHR and GDPR. Results: A total of 50 GDPR requirements and 8 openEHR design principles were identified. The openEHR principles conformed to 30% (15/50) of GDPR requirements. All the openEHR principles were aligned with GDPR requirements. Conclusions: This study showed that the openEHR principles conform well to GDPR, underlining the common wisdom that truly realizing security and privacy requires it to be built in from the start. By using an openEHR-based EHR, the institutions are closer to becoming compliant with GDPR while safeguarding the medical data.

2019

Iris: Secure reliable live-streaming with opportunistic mobile edge cloud offloading

Authors
Martins, R; Correia, ME; Antunes, L; Silva, F;

Publication
FUTURE GENERATION COMPUTER SYSTEMS-THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ESCIENCE

Abstract
The ever-increasing demand for higher quality live streams is driving the need for better networking infrastructures, specially when disseminating content over highly congested areas, such as stadiums, concerts and museums. Traditional approaches to handle this type of scenario relies on a combination of cellular data, through 4G distributed antenna arrays (DAS), with a high count of WiFi (802.11) access points. This obvious requires a substantial upfront cost for equipment, planning and deployment. Recently, new efforts have been introduced to securely leverage the capabilities of wireless multipath, including WiFi multicast, 4G, and device-to-device communications. In order to solve these issues, we propose an approach that lessens the requirements imposed on the wireless infrastructures while potentially expanding wireless coverage through the crowd-sourcing of mobile devices. In order to achieve this, we propose a novel pervasive approach that combines secure distributed systems, WiFi multicast, erasure coding, source coding and opportunistic offloading that makes use of hyperlocal mobile edge clouds. We empirically show that our solution is able to offer a 11 fold reduction on the infrastructural WiFi bandwidth usage without having to modify any existing software or firmware stacks while ensuring stream integrity, authorization and authentication.

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