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The impact of trace and adversary models on location privacy provided by K-anonymity

Published: 10 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Privacy preserving mechanisms help users of location-based services to balance their location privacy while still getting useful results from the service. The provided location privacy depends on the users' behavior and an adversary's knowledge used to locate the users. The aim of this paper is to investigate how users' mobility patterns and adversaries' knowledge affect the location privacy of users querying a location-based service. We consider three mobility trace models in order to generate user traces that cross each other, are parallel to each other and form a circular shape. Furthermore, we consider four adversary models, which are distinguished according to their level of knowledge of users. We simulate the trace and the adversary models by using Distortion-based Metric and K-anonymity. The results show that the location privacy provided by K-anonymity decreases, as users are located closer to each other in the trace models. The impact of the adversary on location privacy is reduced as more users are cloaked together.

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Cited By

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  • (2015)Achieving Bilateral Utility Maximization and Location Privacy Preservation in Database-Driven Cognitive Radio NetworksProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 12th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS)10.1109/MASS.2015.93(181-189)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2015

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cover image ACM Conferences
MPM '12: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Measurement, Privacy, and Mobility
April 2012
55 pages
ISBN:9781450311632
DOI:10.1145/2181196
  • Program Chairs:
  • Hamed Haddadi,
  • Eiko Yoneki
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 10 April 2012

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Author Tags

  1. adversary
  2. location privacy
  3. user traces

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EuroSys '12
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EuroSys '12: Seventh EuroSys Conference 2012
April 10, 2012
Bern, Switzerland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6 of 20 submissions, 30%

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View all
  • (2015)Achieving Bilateral Utility Maximization and Location Privacy Preservation in Database-Driven Cognitive Radio NetworksProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 12th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS)10.1109/MASS.2015.93(181-189)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2015

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