SmartSec: Secret sharing-based location-aware privacy enhancement in smart devices

In the recent past we have witnessed a quick rise of smart devices, including smart phones, tablets, smart watch, smart television as well as other smart devices. The smart devices store quite a lot of sensitive personal data (e.g., private photos). These devices can breach one's privacy if information in the devices are accessed by unauthorized users. Therefore, smart devices are facing threats of privacy leaking and how to protect privacy of smart devices is regarded as an important research challenge. In this paper, we propose a system, coined as SmartSec, which employs secret sharing techniques among multiple smart devices to enhance privacy protection. In particular, SmartSec can achieve privacy enhancement by storing sensitive data (e.g., photos) on at least three devices and requiring at least two of them to access the original data. This will thus secure the data from any unauthorized attackers because any leakage of one piece of secret is meaningless. Further, secret sharing will introduce extra computation and transmission overhead. To reduce such an overhead and optimize the performance, another important feature of SmartSec is that it could recognize and classify different locations by exploiting location tags and then apply different security policy to different locations to achieve the tradeoff of security and performance. For example, a user can demarcate safe regions (e.g., home area) and the sensitive data will be automatically recovered in home region, distributed and stored/masked at different devices in public regions, where the process is automated which provides the user a transparent experience. We implement the system and conducted a series of experiments on the prototype to evaluate the results.