Privacy Vulnerability of Published Anonymous Mobility Traces

Ma, Chris Y.  T.; Yau, David K.  Y.; Yip, Nung Kwan; Rao, Nageswara S.  V.

doi:10.1109/TNET.2012.2208983

Title: Privacy Vulnerability of Published Anonymous Mobility Traces

Abstract

Mobility traces of people and vehicles have been collected and published to assist the design and evaluation of mobile networks, such as large-scale urban sensing networks. Although the published traces are often made anonymous in that the true identities of nodes are replaced by random identifiers, the privacy concern remains. This is because in real life, nodes are open to observations in public spaces, or they may voluntarily or inadvertently disclose partial knowledge of their whereabouts. Thus, snapshots of nodes’ location information can be learned by interested third parties, e.g., directly through chance/engineered meetings between the nodes and their observers, or indirectly through casual conversations or other information sources about people. In this paper, we investigate how an adversary, when equipped with a small amount of the snapshot information termed as side information, can infer an extended view of the whereabouts of a victim node appearing in an anonymous trace. Our results quantify the loss of victim nodes’ privacy as a function of the nodal mobility, the inference strategies of adversaries, and any noise that may appear in the trace or the side information. Generally, our results indicate that the privacy concern is significant in that a relatively small amountmore »« less

Authors:

Ma, Chris Y. T. ^[1]; Yau, David K. Y. ^[2]; Yip, Nung Kwan ^[3]; Rao, Nageswara S. V. ^[4]

Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Illinois (Singapore)
Advanced Digital Sciences Center, Illinois (Singapore); Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (United States)
Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (United States)
Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Publication Date:: Sat Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013

Research Org.:: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:: USDOE Office of Science (SC)

OSTI Identifier:: 1095747

Grant/Contract Number:: AC05-00OR22725

Resource Type:: Accepted Manuscript

Journal Name:: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

Additional Journal Information:: Journal Volume: 21; Journal Issue: 3; Journal ID: ISSN 1063-6692

Publisher:: IEEE/ACM

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

Subject:: 97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING; Privacy; networking

Citation Formats


                    Ma, Chris Y.  T., Yau, David K.  Y., Yip, Nung Kwan, and Rao, Nageswara S.  V. Privacy Vulnerability of Published Anonymous Mobility Traces.  United States: N. p., 2013. 
Web.  doi:10.1109/TNET.2012.2208983.

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                    Ma, Chris Y.  T., Yau, David K.  Y., Yip, Nung Kwan, & Rao, Nageswara S.  V. Privacy Vulnerability of Published Anonymous Mobility Traces.  United States.  https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2012.2208983

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                    Ma, Chris Y.  T., Yau, David K.  Y., Yip, Nung Kwan, and Rao, Nageswara S.  V. Sat .  
"Privacy Vulnerability of Published Anonymous Mobility Traces".  United States.  https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2012.2208983.  https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1095747.

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@article{osti_1095747,

  title        = {Privacy Vulnerability of Published Anonymous Mobility Traces},

  author       = {Ma, Chris Y.  T. and Yau, David K.  Y. and Yip, Nung Kwan and Rao, Nageswara S.  V.},

  abstractNote = {Mobility traces of people and vehicles have been collected and published to assist the design and evaluation of mobile networks, such as large-scale urban sensing networks. Although the published traces are often made anonymous in that the true identities of nodes are replaced by random identifiers, the privacy concern remains. This is because in real life, nodes are open to observations in public spaces, or they may voluntarily or inadvertently disclose partial knowledge of their whereabouts. Thus, snapshots of nodes’ location information can be learned by interested third parties, e.g., directly through chance/engineered meetings between the nodes and their observers, or indirectly through casual conversations or other information sources about people. In this paper, we investigate how an adversary, when equipped with a small amount of the snapshot information termed as side information, can infer an extended view of the whereabouts of a victim node appearing in an anonymous trace. Our results quantify the loss of victim nodes’ privacy as a function of the nodal mobility, the inference strategies of adversaries, and any noise that may appear in the trace or the side information. Generally, our results indicate that the privacy concern is significant in that a relatively small amount of side information is sufficient for the adversary to infer the true identity (either uniquely or with high probability) of a victim in a set of anonymous traces. For instance, an adversary is able to identify the trace of 30%-50% of the victims when she has collected 10 pieces of side information about a victim.},

  doi          = {10.1109/TNET.2012.2208983},

  journal      = {IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking},

  number       = 3,

  volume       = 21,

  place        = {United States},

  year         = {Sat Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013},

  month        = {Sat Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013}

}

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Works referencing / citing this record:

Evaluating the Privacy Risk of Location-Based Services
book, January 2012

Freudiger, Julien; Shokri, Reza; Hubaux, Jean-Pierre
Financial Cryptography and Data Security
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-27576-0_3

Asynchronous side information attack from the edge: an approach to identify participants from anonymous mobility traces
journal, November 2018

Zhang, Hongji; Li, Wenzhong; Lu, Sanglu
CCF Transactions on Networking, Vol. 2, Issue 1
DOI: 10.1007/s42045-018-0001-2

Emergent Technologies in Big Data Sensing: A Survey
journal, January 2015

Zhu, Ting; Xiao, Sheng; Zhang, Qingquan
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, Vol. 2015
DOI: 10.1155/2015/902982

Autonomous Vehicles for Smart and Sustainable Cities: An In-Depth Exploration of Privacy and Cybersecurity Implications
journal, April 2018

Lim, Hazel; Taeihagh, Araz
Energies, Vol. 11, Issue 5
DOI: 10.3390/en11051062

An Efficient Dummy-Based Location Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Internet of Things Services
journal, September 2019

Du, Yongwen; Cai, Gang; Zhang, Xuejun
Information, Vol. 10, Issue 9
DOI: 10.3390/info10090278

Autonomous Vehicles for Smart and Sustainable Cities: An In-Depth Exploration of Privacy and Cybersecurity Implications
text, January 2018

Lim, Hazel Si Min; Taeihagh, Araz
arXiv
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1804.10367

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Title: Privacy Vulnerability of Published Anonymous Mobility Traces

Abstract

Citation Formats

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