A survey on privacy: Terminology, mechanisms and attacks

Privacy is considered as one of the hottest issues in nowadays communication research areas. It focuses on protecting the content of the transmitted data and on preserving the contextual information such as the identity of the communicating entities. This paper presents an overview of research done in this area in order to build a foundation that helps the research community to understand more the privacy concept and issues. We start by defining the privacy and classifying its requirements in two categories: content-oriented privacy and contextual privacy. We concentrate particularly on contextual privacy by identifying its properties. We also expose a taxonomy according to the type of transferred messages. An analysis of privacy protocols and systems described in the literature is then performed, followed by a description of privacy attacks. Based on the compromised privacy requirements, we propose a new expressive and precise classification of attacks. It is more adapted to privacy context and helps to identify areas of remaining weaknesses that require additional work. Moreover, we describe various attacks against privacy. Finally, we highlight the future research directions in this area.