Privacy and accountability for location-based aggregate statistics

A significant and growing class of location-based mobile applications aggregate position data from individual devices at a server and compute aggregate statistics over these position streams. Because these devices can be linked to the movement of individuals, there is significant danger that the aggregate computation will violate the location privacy of individuals. This paper develops and evaluates PrivStats, a system for computing aggregate statistics over location data that simultaneously achieves two properties: first, provable guarantees on location privacy even in the face of any side information about users known to the server, and second, privacy-preserving accountability (i.e., protection against abusive clients uploading large amounts of spurious data). PrivStats achieves these properties using a new protocol for uploading and aggregating data anonymously as well as an efficient zero-knowledge proof of knowledge protocol we developed from scratch for accountability. We i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Raluca A. Popa, Andrew J. Blumberg, Hari Balakrishnan, Frank H. Li
• Keywords: Aggregate Computation, CCS 2011, Commodity Servers, Computer Communication Networks, Security Privacy