Title
De-anonymization attack on geolocated data
Date Issued
01 December 2013
Access level
open access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Universidad de Toulouse
Abstract
With the advent of GPS-equipped devices, a massive amount of location data is being collected, raising the issue of the privacy risks incurred by the individuals whose movements are recorded. In this work, we focus on a specific inference attack called the de-anonymization attack, by which an adversary tries to infer the identity of a particular individual behind a set of mobility traces. More specifically, we propose an implementation of this attack based on a mobility model called Mobility Markov Chain (MMC). A MMC is built out from the mobility traces observed during the training phase and is used to perform the attack during the testing phase. We design two distance metrics quantifying the closeness between two MMCs and combine these distances to build de-anonymizers that can re-identify users in an anonymized geolocated dataset. Experiments conducted on real datasets demonstrate that the attack is both accurate and resilient to sanitization mechanisms such as downsampling. © 2013 IEEE.
Start page
789
End page
797
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ingeniería de sistemas y comunicaciones
Ciencias de la computación
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84893461741
ISBN of the container
9780769550220
Conference
Proceedings - 12th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2013
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus