Title
De-anonymization attack on geolocated data
Date Issued
01 January 2014
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Université de Toulouse
Publisher(s)
Academic Press Inc.
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). An 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 several distance metrics quantifying the closeness between two MMCs and combine these distances to build de-anonymizers that can re-identify users. Experiments conducted on real datasets demonstrate that the attack is both accurate and resilient to sanitization mechanisms. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.
Start page
1597
End page
1614
Volume
80
Issue
8
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ciencias de la computación
Ingeniería de sistemas y comunicaciones
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84905121759
Source
Journal of Computer and System Sciences
ISSN of the container
00220000
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus