Mingyan Li
Krishna Sampigethaya
ABSTRACT
In wireless networks, the location tracking of devices and vehicles (nodes) based on their identifiable and locatable broadcasts, presents potential threats to the location privacy of their users. While the tracking of nodes can be mitigated to an extent by updating their identifiers to decorrelate their traversed locations, such an approach is still vulnerable to tracking methods that utilize the predictability of node movement to limit the location privacy provided by the identifier updates. On the other hand, since each user may need privacy at different locations and times, a user-centric approach is needed to enable the nodes to independently determine where/when to update their identifiers. However, mitigation of tracking with a user-centric approach is difficult due to the lack of synchronization between updating nodes. This paper addresses the challenges to providing location privacy by identifier updates due to the predictability of node locations and the asynchronous updates, and proposes a user-centric scheme called Swing that increases location privacy by enabling the nodes to loosely synchronize updates when changing their velocity. Further, since each identifier update inherently trades off network service for privacy, the paper also introduces an approach called Swap, which is an extension of Swing, that enables the nodes to exchange their identifiers to potentially maximize the location privacy provided by each update, hence reducing the number of updates needed to meet the desired privacy levels. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated under random and restricted pedestrian mobility.
- 5.9GHz DSRC. http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc32/dsrc/.Google Scholar
- P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan. RADAR: An in-building RF-based user location and tracking system. In Proc. of INFOCOM, pages 775--784, 2000.Google ScholarCross Ref
- F. Bai, N. Sadagopan, and A. Helmy. IMPORTANT: A framework to systematically analyze the impact of mobility on performance of routing protocols for adhoc networks. In Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, pages 825--835, 2003.Google ScholarCross Ref
- A. R. Beresford. Location Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004.Google Scholar
- A. R. Beresford and F. Stajano. Location privacy in pervasive computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2(1):46--55, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Bettstetter, G. Resta, and P. Santi. The node distribution of the random waypoint mobility model for wireless ad hoc networks. IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing, 2(3):257--269, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Chaum. Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms. Communications of the ACM, 24(2):84--88, 1981. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Chaum. The dining cryptographers problem: Unconditional sender and recipient untraceability. Journal of Cryptology, 1:65--75, 1988. Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Chen, S. Chan, and S. Liew. Mixed-modeWLAN: the integration of ad hoc mode with wireless LAN infrastructure. In Proc. of IEEE Globecom, pages 231--235, 2003.Google Scholar
- T. M. Cover and J. A. Thomas. Elements of Information Theory. JohnWiley & Sons, Inc., 1991. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. Dötzer. Privacy issues in vehicular ad hoc networks. In Proc. of PET, pages 197--209, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Gruteser and D. Grunwald. Anonymous usage of location-based services through spatial and temporal cloaking. In Proc. of ACM MobiSys, pages 31--42, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- . Gruteser and D. Grunwald. Enhancing location privacy in wireless LAN through disposable interface identifiers: a quantitative analysis. In Proc. of ACM WMASH, pages 46--55, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Q. He, D. Wu, and P. Khosla. The quest for personal control over mobile location privacy. IEEE Communications Magazine, 42(5):130--136, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Hoh and M. Gruteser. Location privacy through path confusion. In Proc. of IEEE SecureComm, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. Huang, K. Matsuura, H. Yamane, and K. Sezaki. Towards modeling wireless location privacy. In Proc. of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET), pages 59--77, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. Huang, K. Matsuura, H. Yamane, and K. Sezaki. Silent cascade: Enhancing location privacy without communication qos degradation. In Proc. of Security in Pervasive Computing (SPC), pages 165--180, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- R. Leenes and B.-J. Koops. 'Code' and privacy - or how technology is slowly eroding privacy. In Essays on the normative role of information technology. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague, Netherlands, 2005.Google Scholar
- H. Nissenbaum. Privacy as contextual integrity. Washington Law Review, 17:101--139, 2004.Google Scholar
- T. S. Rappaport, J. H. Reed, and B. D.Woerner. Position location using wireless communications on highways of the future. IEEE Communications Magazine, 10(1):33--41, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Raya and J.-P. Hubaux. The security of vehicular ad hoc neworks. Proc. of ACM SASN, pages 11--21, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Samarati and L. Sweeney. Protecting privacy when disclosing information: k-anonymity and its enforcement through generalization and suppression. In Tech. Report SRI-CSL-98-04, CS Lab, SRI International, 1998.Google Scholar
- K. Sampigethaya, L. Huang, M. Li, R. Poovendran, K. Matsuura, and K. Sezaki. CARAVAN: Providing location privacy for VANET. In Proc. of Embedded Security in Cars (ESCAR), 2005.Google Scholar
- A. Serjantov and G. Danezis. Towards an information theoretic metric for anonymity. In Proc. of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET), pages 41--53, 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Serjantov, R. Dingledine, and P. Syverson. From a trickle to a flood: Active attacks on several mix types. In Proc. of Information Hiding Workshop, pages 36--52, 2002 Google ScholarDigital Library
- IEEE 802.11WG. http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/.Google Scholar
- X. Yang. IEEE 802.11e: Qos provisioning at the MAC layer. IEEE Wireless Communications, 11(3):72--79, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Yoon, M. Liu, and B. Noble. Random waypoint consideredGoogle Scholar
Index Terms
- Swing & swap: user-centric approaches towards maximizing location privacy
Recommendations
Protecting location privacy using location semantics
KDD '11: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data miningAs the use of mobile devices increases, a location-based service (LBS) becomes increasingly popular because it provides more convenient context-aware services. However, LBS introduces problematic issues for location privacy due to the nature of the ...
A differentially private algorithm for location data release
The rise of mobile technologies in recent years has led to large volumes of location information, which are valuable resources for knowledge discovery such as travel patterns mining and traffic analysis. However, location dataset has been confronted ...
A privacy-aware location cloaking technique reducing bandwidth consumption in location-based services
QUeST '12: Proceedings of the Third ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Querying and Mining Uncertain Spatio-Temporal DataThe explosive growth of location-detection devices, such as GPS (Global Positioning System), continuously increases users' privacy threat in location-based services (LBSs). However, in order to enjoy such services, the user must precisely disclose his/...
Comments