Abstract
Web technologies provide several means to infringe user privacy. This is especially true when customers with the intent to buy tangible goods submit their orders containing their real identity and physical address. Then in practice, the vendor can link this information with all information gathered about the customer beforehand, e.g., observation data on him while browsing through the product catalog. In this paper, we present a solution based on mobile agents that can be used to prevent the vendor from directly linking information gathered about the customer while searching with identifying information that is contained in the order. The system allows to introduce an agent delay at the agent base station which can increase the cardinality of the group of candidates to be linked to a product, and thereby to decrease the linking probability.
This work was partly supported by the German Ministery of Education and Research, projects NSI and HORN, and by the European Commission, project OPELIX.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Robert M. Arlein, Ben Jai, Markus Jakobsson, Fabian Monrose, Michael K. Reiter. Privacypreserving global customization (extended abstract). In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’00), October 2000.
Feng Bao, Robert Deng. Privacy protection for transactions of digital goods. In Information and Communications Security (ICICS 2001), LNCS 2229. SpringerVerlag, November 2001.
Roger Clarke. Internet privacy concerns confirm the case for intervention. Communications of the ACM, 42(2), February 1999.
Donna L. Hoffman, Thomas P. Novak, Marcos Peralta. Building consumer trust online. Communications of the ACM, 42(4), April 1999.
Ari Juels. Targeted advertising... and privacy too. In Progress in Cryptology—CT-RSA 2001, RSA Conference 2001, Proceedings, LNCS 2020. Springer Verlag, 2001.
D. Kristol, L. Montulli. HTTP State Management Mechanism. RFC 2109, February 1997.
Danny B. Lange, Mitsuru Oshima. Programming and Deploying Java Mobile Agents with Aglets. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Michael G. Reed, Paul F. Syverson, David M. Goldschlag. Proxies for anonymous routing. In Proceedings of 12th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC’96). IEEE Press, December 1996.
Michael K. Reiter, Aviel D. Rubin. Crowds: Anonymity for web transactions. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 1(1), 1998.
Ron L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard M. Adleman. A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems. Communications of the ACM, 21(2), February 1978.
Stuart G. Stubblebine, Paul F. Syverson, David M. Goldschlag. Unlinkable serial transactions: Protocols and applications. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 2(4), 1999.
Paul F. Syverson, Michael G. Reed, David M. Goldschlag. Private web browsing. Journal of Computer Security—Special Issue on Web Security, 5(3), 1997.
Dirk Westhoff, Markus Schneider, Claus Unger, Firoz Kaderali. Protecting a mobile agent’s route against collusions. In Selected Areas in Cryptography, 6th Annual InternationalWorkshop (SAC’99), LNCS 1758. Springer Verlag, 2000.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Enzmann, M., Kunz, T., Schneider, M. (2002). Privacy Protection through Unlinkability of Customer Activities in Business Processes Using Mobile Agents. In: Bauknecht, K., Tjoa, A.M., Quirchmayr, G. (eds) E-Commerce and Web Technologies. EC-Web 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45705-4_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45705-4_33
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44137-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45705-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive