Due to the rise of severe and acute infections called Coronavirus 19, contact tracing has become a critical subject in medical science. A system for automatically detecting diseases aids medical professionals in disease diagnosis to lessen the death rate of patients. To automatically diagnose COVID-19 from contact tracing, this research seeks to offer a deep learning technique based on integrating a Bayesian Network and K-anonymity. In this system, data classification is done using the Bayesian Network Model. For privacy concerns, the K-anonymity algorithm is utilized to prevent malicious users from accessing patients personal information. The dataset for this system consisted of 114 patients. The researchers proposed methods such as the Kanonymity model to remove personal information. The age group and occupations were replaced with more extensive categories such as age range and numbers of employed and unemployed. Further, the accuracy score for the Bayesian Network with kanonymity is 97.058\%, which is an exceptional accuracy score. On the other hand, the Bayesian Network without k-anonymity has an accuracy score of 97.1429\%. These two have a minimal percent difference, indicating that they are both excellent and accurate models. The system produced the desired results on the currently available dataset. The researchers can experiment with other approaches to address the problem statements in the future by utilizing other algorithms besides the Bayesian one, observing how they perform on the dataset, and testing the algorithm with undersampled data to evaluate how it performs. In addition, researchers should also gather more information from various sources to improve the sample size distribution and make the model sufficiently fair to generate accurate predictions.

Data anonymization is one of the most important directions in privacy-preserving. However, research shows that simple anonymization of data does not protect privacy. To solve this problem, we present a novel and effective algorithm named tree-based K-degree anonymity (TKDA). We devise a new anonymity sequence generation method to reduce the information loss for social graphs. Then, the dynamic anonymization process is implemented by a depth-first search (DFS) traversal algorithm. Finally, the graph modification algorithm based on the anonymous sequence can keep the original graph structure stable. Average Path Length (APL), Average Clustering Coefficient (ACC), and Transitivity (T) are employed to evaluate the method. Experimental results on several datasets show that TKDA is closer to the values of the original graphs on the correlated three experimental metrics, which indicates that TKDA portrays the real data in more detail and improves the utility of the released data.

The Internet as a whole is a large network of interconnected computer networks and their supporting infrastructure which is divided into 3 parts. The web is a list of websites that can be accessed using search engines like Google, Firefox, and others, this is called as Surface Web. The Internet’s layers stretch well beyond the surface material that many people can quickly reach in their everyday searches. The Deep Web material, which cannot be indexed by regular search engines like Google, is a subset of the internet. The Dark Web, which extends to the deepest reaches of the Deep Web, contains data that has been purposefully hidden. Tor may be used to access the dark web. Tor employs a network of volunteer devices to route users web traffic via a succession of other users computers, making it impossible to track it back to the source. We will analyze and include results about the Dark Web’s presence in various spheres of society in this paper. Further we take dive into about the Tor metrics how the relay list is revised after users are determined based on client requests for directories (using TOR metrics). Other way we can estimate the number of users in anonymous networks. This analysis discusses the purposes for which it is frequently used, with a focus on cybercrime, as well as how law enforcement plays the adversary position. The analysis discusses these secret Dark Web markets, what services they provide, and the events that take place there such as cybercrime, illegal money transfers, sensitive communication etc. Before knowing anything about Dark Web, how a rookie can make mistake of letting any threat or malware into his system. This problem can be tackled by knowing whether to use Windows, or any other OS, or any other service like VPN to enter Dark world. The paper also goes into the agenda of how much of illegal community is involved from India in these markets and what impact does COVID-19 had on Dark Web markets. Our analysis is carried out by searching scholarly journal databases for current literature. By acting as a reference guide and presenting a research agenda, it contributes to the field of the dark web in an efficient way. This paper is totally built for study purposes and precautionary measures for accessing Dark Web.

E-voting plays a vital role in guaranteeing and promoting social fairness and democracy. However, traditional e-voting schemes rely on a centralized organization, leading to a crisis of trust in the vote-counting results. In response to this problem, researchers have introduced blockchain to realize decentralized e-voting, but the adoption of blockchain also brings new issues in terms of flexibility, anonymity, and usability. To this end, in this paper, we propose WeVoting, which provides weightbased flexibility with solid anonymity and enhances usability by designing a voter-independent on-chain counting mechanism. Specifically, we use distributed ElGamal homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proof to achieve voting anonymity with weight. Besides, WeVoting develops a counter-based counting mechanism to enhance usability compared with those self-tallying schemes. By critically designing an honesty-and-activity-based incentive algorithm, WeVoting can guarantee a correct counting result even in the presence of malicious counters. Our security and performance analyses elaborate that WeVoting achieves high anonymity in weighed voting under the premise of meeting the basic security requirements of e-voting. And meanwhile, its counting mechanism is sufficient for practical demands with reasonable overheads.

According to the idea of zero trust, this paper proposed an anonymous identity authentication scheme based on hash functions and pseudo-random number generators, which effectively increased the anonymity and confidentiality when users use the mobile networks, and ensure the security of the server. This scheme first used single-packet authentication technology to realize the application stealth. Secondly, hash functions and pseudo-random number generators were used to replace public key cryptosystems and time synchronization systems, which improved system performance. Thirdly, different methods were set to save encrypted information on the user s mobile device and the server, which realized different forms of anonymous authentication and negotiates a secure session key. Through security analysis, function and performance comparison, the results showed that the scheme had better security, flexibility and practicality, while maintained good communication efficiency.

The development of science and technology has led to the construction of smart cities, and in this scenario, there are many applications that need to provide their real-time location information, which is very likely to cause the leakage of personal location privacy. To address this situation, this paper designs a location privacy protection scheme based on graph anonymity, which is based on the privacy protection idea of K-anonymity, and represents the spatial distribution among APs in the form of a graph model, using the method of finding clustered noisy fingerprint information in the graph model to ensure a similar performance to the real location fingerprint in the localization process, and thus will not be distinguished by the location providers. Experiments show that this scheme can improve the effectiveness of virtual locations and reduce the time cost using greedy strategy, which can effectively protect location privacy.

The paper presents a Tbps-class anonymity router that supports both an anonymity protocol and IP by leveraging a programmable switch. The key design issue is to place both the compute-intensive header decryption function for anonymity protocol forwarding and the memory-intensive IP forwarding function on the processing pipes of a switch with satisfying its hardware requirements. A prototype router on a programmable switch achieves Tbps-scale forwarding.

Anonymity systems are widely used nowadays to protect user identity, but there are various threats currently in the anonymity network, such as virtual private networks, onion routing, and proxy servers. This paper looked at the different anonymity networks that are already out there and proposed a new model to stay anonymous on the internet by using open source tools and methods. This eliminates the current threats. It works by creating a virtual instance on the cloud server and configuring it using open source technologies such as OpenVPN. This model uses elastic cloud computing technology running over existing technologies such as virtual private networks and onion routing. The framework is a new way to stay anonymous on the internet. It is made up of only open source technologies.

The infrastructure required for data storage and processing has become increasingly feasible, and hence, there has been a massive growth in the field of data acquisition and analysis. This acquired data is published, empowering organizations to make informed data-driven decisions based on previous trends. However, data publishing has led to the compromise of privacy as a result of the release of entity-specific information. PrivacyPreserving Data Publishing [1] can be accomplished by methods such as Data S wapping, Differential Privacy, and the likes of k-Anonymity. k-Anonymity is a well-established method used to protect the privacy of the data published. We propose a clustering-based novel algorithm named SAC or the S core, Arrange, and Cluster Algorithm to pre serve privacy based on k-Anonymity. This method outperforms existing methods such as the Mondrian Algorithm by K. LeFevre and the One-pass K-means Algorithm by Jun-Lin Lin from a data quality perspective. S AC can be used to overcome temporal attack across subsequent releases of published data. To measure data quality post anonymization we present a metric that takes into account the relative loss in the information, that occurs while generalizing attribute values.

To improve the security and reliability of remote terminals under trusted cloud platform, an identity authentication model based on DAA optimization is proposed. By introducing a trusted third-party CA, the scheme issues a cross domain DAA certificate to the trusted platform that needs cross domain authentication. Then, privacy CA isolation measures are taken to improve the security of the platform, so that the authentication scheme can be used for identity authentication when ordinary users log in to the host equipped with TPM chip. Finally, the trusted computing platform environment is established, and the performance load distribution and total performance load of each entity in the DAA protocol in the unit of machine cycle can be acquired through experimental analysis. The results show that the scheme can take into account the requirements of anonymity, time cost and cross domain authentication in the trusted cloud computing platform, and it is a useful supplement and extension to the existing theories of web service security.

To improve the security and reliability of remote terminals under trusted cloud platform, an identity authentication model based on DAA optimization is proposed. By introducing a trusted third-party CA, the scheme issues a cross domain DAA certificate to the trusted platform that needs cross domain authentication. Then, privacy CA isolation measures are taken to improve the security of the platform, so that the authentication scheme can be used for identity authentication when ordinary users log in to the host equipped with TPM chip. Finally, the trusted computing platform environment is established, and the performance load distribution and total performance load of each entity in the DAA protocol in the unit of machine cycle can be acquired through experimental analysis. The results show that the scheme can take into account the requirements of anonymity, time cost and cross domain authentication in the trusted cloud computing platform, and it is a useful supplement and extension to the existing theories of web service security.

Microelectronics Security - The need for safe large data storage services is at an all-time high and confidentiality is a fundamental need of any service. Consideration must also be given to service customer anonymity, one of the most important privacy considerations. As a result, the service should offer realistic and fine-grained [11] encrypted data sharing, which allows a data owner to share a cipher text of data with others under certain situations. In order to accomplish the aforesaid characteristics, our system offers a novel privacy- preserving cipher text multi-sharing technique. In this way, proxy re-encryption and anonymity are combined to allow many receivers to safely and conditionally receive a cipher text while maintaining the confidentiality of the underlying message and the identities of the senders and recipients. In this paper, a logical cloud security scheme is introduced called Modified Data Cipher Policies (MDCP), in which it is a new primitive also protects against known cipher text attacks, as demonstrated by the system.

Information Forensics - With the advent of information and communication technology, the digital space is becoming a playing ground for criminal activities. Criminals typically prefer darkness or a hidden place to perform their illegal activities in a real-world while sometimes covering their face to avoid being exposed and getting caught. The same applies in a digital world where criminals prefer features which provide anonymity or hidden features to perform illegal activities. It is from this spirit the Darkweb is attracting all kinds of criminal activities conducted over the Internet such as selling drugs, illegal weapons, child pornography, assassination for hire, hackers for hire, and selling of malicious exploits, to mention a few. Although the anonymity offered by Darkweb can be exploited as a tool to arrest criminals involved in cybercrime, an in-depth research is needed to advance criminal investigation on Darkweb. Analysis of illegal activities conducted in Darkweb is in its infancy and faces several challenges like lack of standard operating procedures. This study proposes progressive standard operating procedures (SOPs) for Darkweb forensics investigation. We provide the four stages of SOP for Darkweb investigation. The proposed SOP consists of the following stages; identification and profiling, discovery, acquisition and preservation, and the last stage is analysis and reporting. In each stage, we consider the objectives, tools and expected results of that particular stage. Careful consideration of this SOP revealed promising results in the Darkweb investigation.

Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) has been proposed to address the security and response time issues of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) in latency-sensitive vehicular network environments, due to the frequent interactions that VANETs need to have with cloud servers. However, the anonymity protection mechanism in VFC may cause the attacker to launch Sybil attacks by fabricating or creating multiple pseudonyms to spread false information in the network, which poses a severe security threat to the vehicle driving. Therefore, in this paper, we summarize different types of Sybil attack detection mechanisms in VFC for the first time, and provide a comprehensive comparison of these schemes. In addition, we also summarize the possible impacts of different types of Sybil attacks on VFC. Finally, we summarize challenges and prospects of future research on Sybil attack detection mechanisms in VFC.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have become a popular weapon for illegal activities. They have the characteristics of decentralization and anonymity, which can effectively avoid the supervision of government departments. How to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions is a crucial issue for regulatory and judicial investigation departments to supervise and combat crimes involving Bitcoin effectively. This paper aims to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions and present a Bitcoin transaction traceability method based on Bitcoin network traffic analysis. According to the characteristics of the physical network that the Bitcoin network relies on, the Bitcoin network traffic is obtained at the physical convergence point of the local Bitcoin network. By analyzing the collected network traffic data, we realize the traceability of the input address of Bitcoin transactions and test the scheme in the distributed Bitcoin network environment. The experimental results show that this traceability mechanism is suitable for nodes connected to the Bitcoin network (except for VPN, Tor, etc.), and can obtain 47.5% recall rate and 70.4% precision rate, which are promising in practice.

In today’s world, digital data are enormous due to technologies that advance data collection, storage, and analyses. As more data are shared or publicly available, privacy is of great concern. Having privacy means having control over your data. The first step towards privacy protection is to understand various aspects of privacy and have the ability to quantify them. Much work in structured data, however, has focused on approaches to transforming the original data into a more anonymous form (via generalization and suppression) while preserving the data integrity. Such anonymization techniques count data instances of each set of distinct attribute values of interest to signify the required anonymity to protect an individual’s identity or confidential data. While this serves the purpose, our research takes an alternative approach to provide quick privacy measures by way of anonymity especially when dealing with large-scale data. This paper presents a study of anonymity measures based on their relevant properties that impact privacy. Specifically, we identify three properties: uniformity, variety, and diversity, and formulate their measures. The paper provides illustrated examples to evaluate their validity and discusses the use of multi-aspects of anonymity and privacy measures.

The development of science and technology has led to the construction of smart cities, and in this scenario, there are many applications that need to provide their real-time location information, which is very likely to cause the leakage of personal location privacy. To address this situation, this paper designs a location privacy protection scheme based on graph anonymity, which is based on the privacy protection idea of K-anonymity, and represents the spatial distribution among APs in the form of a graph model, using the method of finding clustered noisy fingerprint information in the graph model to ensure a similar performance to the real location fingerprint in the localization process, and thus will not be distinguished by the location providers. Experiments show that this scheme can improve the effectiveness of virtual locations and reduce the time cost using greedy strategy, which can effectively protect location privacy.

We introduce the notion of an application-based covert channel—or ABCC—which provides a formal syntax for describing covert channels that tunnel messages through existing protocols. Our syntax captures many recent systems, including DeltaShaper (PETS 2017) and Protozoa (CCS 2020). We also define what it means for an ABCC to be secure against a passive eavesdropper, and prove that suitable abstractions of existing censorship circumvention systems satisfy our security notion. In doing so, we define a number of important non-cryptographic security assumptions that are often made implicitly in prior work. We believe our formalisms may be useful to censorship circumvention developers for reasoning about the security of their systems and the associated security assumptions required.

Internet technology has made surveillance widespread and access to resources at greater ease than ever before. This implied boon has countless advantages. It however makes protecting privacy more challenging for the greater masses, and for the few hacktivists, supplies anonymity. The ever-increasing frequency and scale of cyber-attacks has not only crippled private organizations but has also left Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA's) in a fix: as data depicts a surge in cases relating to cyber-bullying, ransomware attacks; and the force not having adequate manpower to tackle such cases on a more microscopic level. The need is for a tool, an automated assistant which will help the security officers cut down precious time needed in the very first phase of information gathering: reconnaissance. Confronting the surface web along with the deep and dark web is not only a tedious job but which requires documenting the digital footprint of the perpetrator and identifying any Indicators of Compromise(IOC's). TORSION which automates web reconnaissance using the Open Source Intelligence paradigm, extracts the metadata from popular indexed social sites and un-indexed dark web onion sites, provided it has some relating Intel on the target. TORSION's workflow allows account matching from various top indexed sites, generating a dossier on the target, and exporting the collected metadata to a PDF file which can later be referenced.

Deep web refers to sites that cannot be found by search engines and makes up the 96% of the digital world. The dark web is the part of the deep web that can only be accessed through specialised tools and anonymity networks. To avoid monitoring and control, communities that seek for anonymization are moving to the dark web. In this work, we scrape five dark web forums and construct five graphs to model user connections. These networks are then studied and compared using data mining techniques and social network analysis tools; for each community we identify the key actors, we study the social connections and interactions, we observe the small world effect, and we highlight the type of discussions among the users. Our results indicate that only a small subset of users are influential, while the rapid dissemination of information and resources between users may affect behaviours and formulate ideas for future members.

With the advent of the era of big data, the files that need to be stored in the storage system will increase exponentially. Cloud storage has become the most popular data storage method due to its powerful convenience and storage capacity. However, in order to save costs, some cloud service providers, Malicious deletion of the user's infrequently accessed data causes the user to suffer losses. Aiming at data integrity and privacy issues, a blockchain-based cloud storage integrity verification scheme for recoverable data is proposed. The scheme uses the Merkle tree properties, anonymity, immutability and smart contracts of the blockchain to effectively solve the problems of cloud storage integrity verification and data damage recovery, and has been tested and analyzed that the scheme is safe and effective.

When users request location services, they are easy to expose their privacy information, and the scheme of using a third-party server for location privacy protection has high requirements for the credibility of the server. To solve these problems, a localized differential privacy protection scheme in mobile environment is proposed, which uses Markov chain model to generate probability transition matrix, and adds Laplace noise to construct a location confusion function that meets differential privacy, Conduct location confusion on the client, construct and upload anonymous areas. Through the analysis of simulation experiments, the scheme can solve the problem of untrusted third-party server, and has high efficiency while ensuring the high availability of the generated anonymous area.