Research Profile

Dr. Bogdan Carbunar’s interests lie at the intersection of security, privacy and distributed systems, with a focus on attacks and defenses against wireless and online social networks.

His most recent projects include the following.

• Toward safe cities through mobile and social networking technologies.

As population density grows and natural disasters and man-made incidents (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, riots) impact increasing number of people, maintaining the safety of citizens, an essential smart city component, becomes a problem of paramount significance and difficulty.  In this project we propose to combine crime information with data collected from participating mobile devices and geosocial networks to define spatiotemporal safety context and integrate real time safety suggestions into the daily experiences of users. Privacy is of particular concern in this project, as location and safety information of users are sensitive information. We will develop solutions that preserve the privacy of participants.

• Detecing and handling fake information in geosocial networks.

With tens of millions of reviews and tens of millions of monthly unique visitors, geosocial networks are playing an increasingly influential part in our lives.  Their popularity and impact has however placed these sites in a critical situation. Malicious users can claim to be at fake locations, insert fake reviews for venues and game the offered reward systems. In this project we play a dual role. First, we develop tools proving that such attacks are easy to perform. Second, we devise, implement and test a suite of mechanisms for (i) detecting fake user check-ins, (ii) detecting individual fake reviews as well as large scale review campaigns and (iii) detect attempts at cheating the reward systems (badges) while simultaneously preserving the privacy of honest participants.

Previous Accomplishments

• Collaboration
  • Stony Brook University
  • Georgia Tech
  • IBM Research
  • Purdue University
  • New Jersey Institute of Technology
  • University of Houston
  • University of Waterloo
  • Motorola Mobility

Relevant Publications

1. Bogdan Carbunar, Rahul Potharaju. You Unlocked the Mt. Everest Badge In Foursquare! Countering Location Fraud in GeoSocial Networks. To appear in the 9th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), Las Vegas, October 2012
2. Jaime Ballesteros, Mahmudur Rahman, Bogdan Carbunar, Naphtali Rishe. Safe Cities. A Participatory Sensing Approach. To appear in the 37th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), Orlando, October 2012.
3. Bogdan Carbunar, Radu Sion, Rahul Potharaju, Moussa Ehsan. The Shy Mayor: Private Badges in GeoSocial Networks. In Proceedings of the 10th Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS), 2012.
4. Bogdan Carbunar,Michael Pearce, Shivajit Mohapatra, Loren J. Rittle, Venu Vasudevan, Octavian Carbunar. Secure Synchronization of Periodic Updates in Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Volume 21, Issue 8, 2010. Extends IEEE ICNP 2008 paper.
5. Bogdan Carbunar, Radu Sion. Write-Once Read-Many Oblivious RAM. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), Volume 6, Issue 4, 2011. Extends ACNS 2010 paper.