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 »
- Authors:
-
- 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:
- 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.
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
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.
@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}
}
Web of Science
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