An incentive-based architecture to enable privacy in dynamic environments.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to propose the use of priority-based incentives for collaborative hiding of confidential information in dynamic environments, such as self-organized networks, peer-to-peer systems, pervasive and grid computing applications. Design/methodology/approach - The paper documents the necessity of ISSON (Incentives for Secret-sharing in Self-Organised Networks); it provides functional and technical details on the proposed architecture; and, it assesses its feasibility in mobile ad-hoc networks through real experiments. The paper elaborates on the availability of the hidden information through an analytical framework. Findings - Through the real experiments, ISSON was found to be efficient in terms of communication and processing costs. Additionally, it avoids collusions for unauthorized revealing of the hidden information, and ensures the unlinkability and availability of the secret when it is divided and stored to peers. Originality/value - The proposed, incentive-based, privacy enforcement architecture is novel and applies to distributed, dynamic, and self-configured computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]