An Obfuscation-Based Approach for Protecting Location Privacy

Ardagna, Claudio Agostino; Cremonini, Marco; Vimercati, Sabrina De Capitani di; Samarati, Pierangela

doi:10.1109/tdsc.2009.25

Cited by 222 publications

(145 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(39 reference statements)

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“…Location privacy has been studied over the past decade along two orthogonal dimensions: spatial cloaking through location k-anonymity represented by [17,26,7,32,13,6] and mix-zone based privacy protection and its variations represented by [9,15,16,11,29,25]. However, these approaches are suitable only for snapshot queries and are inadequate and ineffective for protecting location privacy of mobile users with continuous query services.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anonymizing continuous queries with delay-tolerant mix-zones over road networks

Palanisamy

Liu

Lee

et al. 2013

Distrib Parallel Databases

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This paper presents a delay-tolerant mix-zone framework for protecting the location privacy of mobile users against continuous query correlation attacks. First, we describe and analyze the continuous query correlation attacks (CQ-attacks) that perform query correlation based inference to break the anonymity of road networkaware mix-zones. We formally study the privacy strengths of the mix-zone anonymization under the CQ-attack model and argue that spatial cloaking or temporal cloaking over road network mix-zones is ineffective and susceptible to attacks that carry out inference by combining query correlation with timing correlation (CQ-timing attack) and transition correlation (CQ-transition attack) information. Next, we introduce three types of delay-tolerant road network mix-zones (i.e., temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal) that are free from CQ-timing and CQ-transition attacks and in contrast to conventional mix-zones, perform a combination of both location mixing and identity mixing of spatially and temporally perturbed user locations to achieve stronger anonymity under the CQ-attack model. We show that by combining temporal and spatial delay-tolerant mix-zones, we can obtain the strongest anonymity for continuous queries while making acceptable tradeoff between anonymous query processing cost and temporal delay incurred in anonymous query processing. We evaluate the proposed techniques through extensive experiments conducted on realistic traces produced by GTMobiSim on different scales of geographic maps. Our experiments show that the proposed techniques offer high level of anonymity and attack resilience to continuous queries.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anonymizing continuous queries with delay-tolerant mix-zones over road networks

Palanisamy

Liu

Lee

et al. 2013

Distrib Parallel Databases

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“…Among the most popular techniques to protect user's location, the obfuscation gained much interest [1,2,10,19]. Location obfuscation is the process of degrading the quality of information about a person's location, with the aim of protecting that person's location privacy [1,4]. In [1,11], the authors propose obfuscation techniques by enlarging, shifting, and reducing the area containing real user's location.…”

Section: Location Obfuscationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Location obfuscation is the process of degrading the quality of information about a person's location, with the aim of protecting that person's location privacy [1,4]. In [1,11], the authors propose obfuscation techniques by enlarging, shifting, and reducing the area containing real user's location. However, these obfuscation techniques just deal with geometry of the obfuscated region, not concern about what are included inside.…”

Section: Location Obfuscationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Semantic-Aware Obfuscation for Location Privacy at Database Level

Dang

2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Part 1: Information and Communication Technology- Eurasia Conference (ICT-EurAsia)International audienceAlthough many techniques have been proposed to deal with location privacy problem, which is one of popular research issues in location based services, some limitations still remain and hence they cannot be applied to the real world. One of the most typical proposed techniques is obfuscation that preserves location privacy by degrading the quality of user’s location information. But the less exact information, the more secure and the less effective services can be supported. Thus the goal of obfuscated techniques is balancing between privacy and quality of services. However, most of obfuscated techniques are separated from database level, leading to other security and performance issues. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to protect location privacy at database level, called Semantic Bob-tree, an index structure that is based on Bdual-tree and Bob-tree and contains semantic aware information in its nodes. It can achieve high level of privacy and keep up the quality of services

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“…Location privacy has been studied over the past decade along two orthogonal dimensions: spatial cloaking through location k-anonymity represented by [20,31,9,40,15,8] and mix-zone based privacy protection and its variations represented by [11,18,19,13,34,30]. Some of them had identified the additional vulnerability of location disclosure due to mobile users traveling on spatially constrained road networks [40,34].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effective mix-zone anonymization techniques for mobile travelers

Palanisamy

Liu

2013

Geoinformatica

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Mix-zones are recognized as an alternative and complementary approach to spatial cloaking based location privacy protection. Unlike spatial cloaking techniques that perturb the location resolution through location k-anonymization, mixzones break the continuity of location exposure by ensuring that users' movements cannot be traced while they are inside a mix-zone. In this paper we provide an overview of some known attacks that make mix-zones on road networks vulnerable and discuss a set of counter measures to make road network mix-zones attackresilient. Concretely, we categorize the vulnerabilities of road network mix-zones into two classes: one due to the road network characteristics and user mobility, and the other due to the temporal, spatial and semantic correlations of location queries. We propose efficient road network mix-zone construction techniques that are resilient to attacks based on road network characteristics. Furthermore, we enhance the road network mix-zone framework with the concept of delay-tolerant mix-zones that introduce a combination of spatial and temporal shifts in the location exposure of the users to achieve higher anonymity. We study the factors that impact on the effectiveness of each of these attacks and evaluate the efficiency of the counter measures through extensive experiments on traces produced by GTMobiSim at different scales of geographic maps.

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An Obfuscation-Based Approach for Protecting Location Privacy

Cited by 222 publications

References 25 publications

Anonymizing continuous queries with delay-tolerant mix-zones over road networks

Anonymizing continuous queries with delay-tolerant mix-zones over road networks

Semantic-Aware Obfuscation for Location Privacy at Database Level

Effective mix-zone anonymization techniques for mobile travelers

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