Trajectory and Policy Aware Sender Anonymity in Location Based Services

We consider Location-based Service (LBS) settings, where a LBS provider logs the requests sent by mobile device users over a period of time and later wants to publish/share these logs. Log sharing can be extremely valuable for advertising, data mining research and network management, but it poses a serious threat to the privacy of LBS users. Sender anonymity solutions prevent a malicious attacker from inferring the interests of LBS users by associating them with their service requests after gaining access to the anonymized logs. With the fast-increasing adoption of smartphones and the concern that historic user trajectories are becoming more accessible, it becomes necessary for any sender anonymity solution to protect against attackers that are trajectory-aware (i.e. have access to historic user trajectories) as well as policy-aware (i.e they know the log anonymization policy). We call such attackers TP-aware. This paper introduces a first privacy guarantee against TP-aware attackers...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Alin Deutsch, Richard Hull, Avinash Vyas, Kevin Keliang Zhao
• Keywords: Approximation Algorithm, CORR 2012, Data Mining Research, Education, Mobile Device Users