A Privacy Enhancing Architecture for Secure Wearable Devices. Details and explanations can be found here.
The impressive growth of the field of communication technology leads to the expansion of wearable devices and embedded systems. This upgrowth has turned the focus towards low power consumptions, small sizes and extremely embedded designs. Though higher efforts in these fields grant the boon of better usability, performances and user’s experience, the price is often paid in terms of security and user’s privacy. While wearable devices, often deprived of operating systems, possess only a small embedded processor with minimal computational power, the computer server has the capability to execute advanced and expensive computations. In this paper, we describe an architecture of a privacy enhancing technology, exploiting the Algebraic MACs and keyed-verification anonymous credentials.. This architecture involves a server issuing and verifying the anonymous credentials, a user’s wearable, and RF beacons for indoor positioning. The design of each entity remains flexible, generic and scalable in order to encourage further enhancements and easy integration into real-world applications. This project also presents an example of the architecture’s hardware prototype and provides directions towards the realisation of a final industrial system.
A link to a blog post describing this project is available at the following address: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2016/11/01/a-privacy-enhancing-architecture-for-secure-wearable-devices/.
This project is the result of my master thesis at University College London (UCL), and is available here. You can also find a presentation of this project here.