Outsource Photo Sharing and Searching for Mobile Devices With Privacy Protection
This addresses privacy concerns for mobile device users in cloud-based photo services, though it is incremental as it builds on existing image search technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling privacy-preserving photo sharing and searching on mobile devices via cloud services, achieving this through a framework that protects photo and search content from cloud servers while maintaining efficiency, as demonstrated with 31,772 real-life images.
With the proliferation of mobile devices, cloud-based photo sharing and searching services are becoming common due to the mobile devices' resource constrains. Meanwhile, there is also increasing concern about privacy in photos. In this work, we present a framework \ourprotocolNSP, which enables cloud servers to provide privacy-preserving photo sharing and search as a service to mobile device users. Privacy-seeking users can share their photos via our framework to allow only their authorized friends to browse and search their photos using resource-bounded mobile devices. This is achieved by our carefully designed architecture and novel outsourced privacy-preserving computation protocols, through which no information about the outsourced photos or even the search contents (including the results) would be revealed to the cloud servers. Our framework is compatible with most of the existing image search technologies, and it requires few changes to the existing cloud systems. The evaluation of our prototype system with 31,772 real-life images shows the communication and computation efficiency of our system.