Uniform Obfuscation for Location Privacy

As location-based services emerge, many people feel exposed to high privacy threats. Privacy protection is a major challenge for such applications. A broadly used approach is perturbation, which adds an ar- tificial noise to positions and returns an obfuscated measurement to the requester. Our main finding is that, unless the noise is chosen properly, these methods do not withstand attacks based on probabilistic analysis. In this paper, we define a strong adversary model that uses probability calculus to de-obfuscate the location measurements. Such a model has general applicability and can evaluate the resistance of a generic location- obfuscation technique. We then propose UniLO, an obfuscation operator which resists to such an adversary. We prove the resistance through for- mal analysis. We finally compare the resistance of UniLO with respect to other noise-based obfuscation operators

Uncertainty for anonymity and 2-dimensional range query distortion

In this work, we study the problem of anonymity-preserving data publishing in moving objects databases. In particular, the trajectory of a mobile user on the plane is no longer a polyline in a two-dimensional space, instead it is a two-dimensional surface: we know that the trajectory of the mobile user is within this surface, but we do not know exactly where. We transform the surface's boundary poly-lines to dual points and we focus on the information distortion introduced by this space translation. We develop a set of efficient spatio-temporal access methods and we experimentally measure the impact of information distortion by comparing the performance results of the same spatio-temporal range queries executed on the original database and on the anonymized one. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Privacy Preservation over Untrusted Mobile Networks

Abstract. The proliferation of mobile devices has given rise to novel user-centric applications and services. In current mobile systems, users gain access to remote servers over mobile network operators. These operators are typically assumed to be trusted and to manage the information they collect in a privacy-preserving way. Such information, however, is extremely sensitive and coveted by many companies, which may use it to improve their business. In this context, safeguarding the users ’ privacy against the prying eyes of the network operators is an emerging requirement. In this chapter, we first present a survey of existing state-of-the-art protection mechanisms and their challenges when deployed in the context of wired and wireless networks. Moreover, we illustrate recent and ongoing research that attempts to address different aspects of privacy in mobile applications. Furthermore, we present a new proposal to ensure private communication in the context of hybrid mobile networks, which integrate wired, wireless and cellular technologies. We conclude by outlining open problems and possible future research directions.