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International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Systems

SecureComm 2016: Security and Privacy in Communication Networks pp 496–513Cite as

Unique on the Road: Re-identification of Vehicular Location-Based Metadata

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Abstract

For digging individuals’ information from anonymous metadata, usually the first step is to identify the entities in metadata and associate them with persons in the real world. If an entity in metadata is uniquely re-identified, its host is possibly confronting a serious privacy disclosure problem. In this paper, we study the privacy issue in VLBS (Vehicular Location-Based Service) by investigating the re-identification problem of vehicular location-based metadata in a VLBS server. We find that the trajectories of vehicles are highly unique after studying 131 millions mobility traces of taxis in Shenzhen and 1.1 billions of taxis in Shanghai. More specifically, with the help of the urban road maps, four spatio-temporal points are sufficient to uniquely identify vehicles, achieving an accuracy of 95.35%. This indicates that there is a high risk of privacy leakage when VLBS applications are widely deployed.

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Acknowledgements

The research of authors is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grants 61571331, the Integrated Project for Major Research Plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 91218301, Fok Ying-Tong Education Foundation for Young Teachers in the Higher Education Institutions of China under Grant 151066, “Shuguang Program” from Shanghai Education Development Foundation under Grant 14SG20, the Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Action Plan Project under Grant 16511100901, and the Shanghai Innovation Action Project under Grant 16DZ1100200. We thank all anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tongji University, Shanghai, 201804, China

    Zheng Xiao, Cheng Wang & Changjun Jiang

  2. Software School, Fudan University, Shanghai, 201203, China

    Weili Han

Authors
  1. Zheng Xiao
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  2. Cheng Wang
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  3. Weili Han
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  4. Changjun Jiang
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Cheng Wang or Changjun Jiang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Robert Deng

  2. Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

    Jian Weng

  3. University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA

    Kui Ren

  4. SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA

    Vinod Yegneswaran

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© 2017 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Xiao, Z., Wang, C., Han, W., Jiang, C. (2017). Unique on the Road: Re-identification of Vehicular Location-Based Metadata. In: Deng, R., Weng, J., Ren, K., Yegneswaran, V. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2016. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 198. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59608-2_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59608-2_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-59607-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-59608-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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