A Cloud-based Mobile Privacy Protection System with Efficient Cache Mechanism

• Published in: Journal of computing and information technology Vol. 29; no. 4; pp. 219 - 234
• Main Authors: Dai, Wenyun, Chen, Longbin
• Format: Journal Article Paper
• Language: English
• Published: Sveuciliste U Zagrebu 01.12.2021; Fakultet elektrotehnike i računarstva Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
• Subjects: Access control; cloud based storage; Cloud computing; Data security; hierarchical storage management; Information storage and retrieval; Methods; Mobile applications; Mobile devices; Privacy; Privacy, Right of; Safety and security measures; security and privacy; Wireless telephone software; United States
• ISSN: 1330-1136; 1846-3908; 1846-3908
• DOI: 10.20532/cit.2021.1005295

People increasingly rely on their mobile devices and use them to store a lot of data. Some of the data are personal and private, whose leakage leads to users' privacy harm. Meanwhile, mobile apps and services over-collect users' data due to the coarse-grained access control approach utilized by the mobile operating system. We propose a cloud-based approach to provide fine-grained access control toward data requests. We add privacy level, as a new metadata, to data and manage the storage using different policies correspondingly. However, the proposed approach leads to performance decreases because of the extra communication cost. We also introduce a novel cache mechanism to eliminate the extra cost by storing non-private and popular data on the mobile device. As part of our cache mechanism, we design a user-preference-based ordering method along with the principle of locality to determine how popular some data are. We also design a configurable refresh policy to improve the overall performance. Finally, we evaluate our approach using a real phone in a simulated environment. The results show that our approach can keep the response time of all data requests within a reasonable range and the cache mechanism can further improve the performance.