Virtual individual servers as privacy-preserving proxies for mobile devices

  • Authors:

  • Ramón Cáceres;Landon Cox;Harold Lim;Amre Shakimov;Alexander Varshavsky

  • Affiliations:

  • AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;Duke University, Durham, NC, USA;AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on Networking, systems, and applications for mobile handhelds
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

People increasingly generate content on their mobile devices and upload it to third-party services such as Facebook and Google Latitude for sharing and backup purposes. Although these services are convenient and useful, their use has important privacy implications due to their centralized nature and their acquisitions of rights to user-contributed content. This paper argues that people's interests would be be better served by uploading their data to a machine that they themselves own and control. We term these machines Virtual Individual Servers (VISs) because our preferred instantiation is a virtual machine running in a highly-available utility computing infrastructure. By using VISs, people can better protect their privacy because they retain ownership of their data and remain in control over the software and policies that determine what data is shared with whom. This paper also describes a range of applications of VIS proxies. It then presents our initial implementation and evaluation of one of these applications, a decentralized framework for mobile social services based on VISs. Our experience so far suggests that building such applications on top of the VIS concept is feasible and desirable.