Security and Privacy of Hash-Based Software Applications

Embedded systems such as smartphones and tablets are rapidly becoming our preferred interfaces to the digital world. However, these systems do not yet have the required computing power to perform all the necessary tasks of a user. Moreover, they do not necessarily have all the information to perform certain operations. This is due to various reasons: privacy, intellectual property, memory limitations or restricted access to information. These issues are often circumvented by outsourcing data and computations to remote machines. As a consequence, third parties often manipulate data that are personally identifiable. This is unacceptable as these technologies must ensure users the confidentiality and the integrity of their data, while respecting their privacy. The objective of this thesis is to analyze existing methods and propose new privacy preserving/enhancing tools and mechanisms to protection user's privacy in the scenario of information/computation outsourcing.