Protecting the privacy of user's QoS preferences for multimedia applications

Abstract

Privacy violation is a serious and pressing problem for Internet users that requires immediate solution. This problem is very serious for applications that require the user's identity and QoS preferences like IP-telephony and videoconference applications. In this paper, we will identify the risks of privacy invasion during the setup of interactive multimedia applications, and introduce three schemes to solve the problem of protecting the user's privacy, with varying degree of complexities. The first approach is based on the use of a trusted third party; this has been a common approach for the Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN). The second approach is based on the trust relationship between the communicating parties, and the third approach is based on primitives from the field of secure distributed computation