Towards secure and practical targeted mobile advertising

Targeted mobile advertising has become a key economic force in recent years with the growing mobile app markets. However, the fact that it requires continuous collection of users´ profiles raises severe privacy concerns. In this research, we propose to explore a secure and practical mobile advertising architecture, which aims to enable targeted advertising over encrypted mobile user preferences. The proposed idea is based upon a cryptographic primitive - private stream searching (PSS). We show how PSS can be leveraged in this new context, and discuss a number of solution directions to make our design practical and suitable for mobile devices.