Engineering Privacy And Trust In Social Devices Environments

Abstract

As the concept of smart devices is to make our lives both more efficient and effective, the real opportunities and more importantly the dangers come in consideration. However, there will be a trade-off between privacy and trust depending on the use of a selected device. For the time being all the approaches for asserting trust revolves around propagation of known values of trust which are either users / peers in a trusted networks providing measures for asserting that particular trust value being assessed or the assumption that all social-based applications share the same levels of trust. This triggers the illusion and the effect that users using these platforms have difficulties differentiating the trusted users thus making their own decisions based solely on their limited knowledge of the potentially wide user base or relying on recommendations set by either other users or possibly the application itself.

This Thesis’ purpose is to evaluate the projections of trust and privacy issues that have risen with new implementations to Social Devices concept. With devices gathering proximity information about other nearby devices, the platform’s requirements for privacy varies depending on the level of advisable protection. The client itself has a basic functionality of autonomously and asynchronously accepting requests and desirably forming connections to other devices.