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Location Privacy with Road Network Mix-Zones

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Location Privacy with Road Network Mix-Zones Location Privacy with Road network Mix-zones Balaji Palanisamy, Ling Liu, Kisung Lee, Aameek Singh† and Yuzhe Tang College of Computing, Georgia Tech †IBM Research - Almaden Abstract— Mix-zones are recognized as an alternative and the location privacy of mobile clients [13], [2]. complementary approach to spatial cloaking based approach to Location privacy is a particular type of information privacy. location privacy protection. Mix-zones break the continuity of According to [5], location privacy is defined as the ability to location exposure by ensuring that users’ movements cannot be traced while they reside in a mix-zone. In this paper we provide prevent other unauthorized parties from learning one’s current an overview of various known attacks that make mix-zones on or past location. In LBSs, there are conceivably two types of road networks vulnerable and illustrate a set of counter measures location privacy − personal subscriber level privacy and corpo- to make road network mix-zones attack resilient. Concretely, we rate enterprise-level privacy. Personal subscriber-level privacy categorize the vulnerabilities of road network mix-zones into must supply rights and options to individuals to control when, two classes: one due to the road network characteristics and user mobility, and the other due to the temporal, spatial and why, and how their location is used by an application. With semantic correlations of location queries. For instance, the timing personal subscriber-level privacy, each individual has liberties information of users’ entry and exit into a mix-zone provides to “opt in” and “opt out” of services that take advantage information to launch a timing attack. The non-uniformity in the of their mobile location. Corporate enterprise-level privacy is transitions taken at the road intersection may lead to transition fundamentally different in that corporate IT managers typically attack. An example query correlation attack is the basic continual query (CQ) attacks, which attempt to break the anonymity of control when, why, and how mobile location capabilities road network aware mix-zones by performing query correlation provide application benefits to the organization as a whole. based inference. The CQ-timing attacks carry out inference Location privacy threats refer to the risks that an adversary attacks based on both query correlation and timing correlation, can obtain unauthorized access to raw location data, derived and the CQ-transition attacks execute inference attacks based on or computed location information by locating a transmitting both query correlation and transition correlation. We study the factors that impact on the effectiveness of each of these attacks device, hijacking the location transmission channel, and identi- and evaluate the efficiency of the counter measures, such as fying the subject (person) using a mobile device. In the United non-rectangle mix-zones and delay tolerant mix-zones, through States, privacy risks related to location information have been extensive experiments on traces produced by GTMobiSim at identified in the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2001 [3]. different scales of geographic maps. On one hand, public disclosure of location information enables many useful services such as improved emergency assistance. I. INTRODUCTION Mobile users can obtain a wide variety of location-based infor- Advances in sensing and positioning technology, fueled by mation services, and businesses can extend their competitive wide deployment of wireless local area networks (WLAN), edges to mobile commerce and ubiquitous service provisions. have made many devices location-aware. Location-based ser- On the other hand, without safeguards, extensive deployment vices (applications that require geographic location informa- of location based services may risk location privacy of mobile tion as input) are becoming increasingly common. The collec- users and to expose LBSs to significant vulnerabilities for tion and transfer of location information about a particular abuse. For example, location information can be used to subject can have important privacy implications. Concrete spam users with unwanted advertisements or draw unwanted examples of location-based services (LBSs) include searching inferences from victims’ visits to clinics, doctors’ offices, nearest points of interest (”Where is the nearest gas station entertainment districts, church activities or political events. to my current location?”), spatial alerts (”Remind me when In extreme cases, unauthorized disclosure of private location I drive close to the grocery store”) , location-based social information can lead to physical harm, for example in stalking networking (”Is my colleague Tom currently at his office?”). or domestic abuse scenarios. Such services require the Location-based Service Provider A fair amount of research efforts have been dedicated to to track the location information of their mobile users in protecting location privacy of mobile travelers. While spatial order to deliver location based services. Continuous location location cloaking typically adds uncertainty to the location based services represent queries that are continuously evalu- information exposed to the location query services by increas- ated along the trajectory of a mobile user either periodically ing the spatial resolution of a mobile user’s locations while or aperiodically. Examples of continuous queries (CQs) are meeting location k-anonymity and/or location l-diversity [4], “informing me the nearest gas stations coming up along the [10], [11], [12], [18], mix-zone based techniques anonymize highway I-85 south every 3 minutes in the next 30 minutes” user identity by restricting when and where the exposure of or “show me the restaurants on highway I85 north within 5 users’ positions are allowed [5]. Mix-zones are regions in miles every two minutes during the next hour”. Although LBSs space where no applications can trace user movements. The offer users many interesting and life enhancing experiences, anonymity in mix-zones is guaranteed by enforcing that a they also open doors for new security risks that can endanger set of users enter, change pseudonyms and exit a mix-zone in a way such that the mapping between their old and new transition attacks in which inference attack is performed based pseudonyms is not revealed [5]. The idea of building mix- on both query correlation and transition correlation. We show zones at road intersections was first proposed in [8] and [6]. An how the anonymity of mix-zone based techniques breaks under optimal placement of mix-zones on a road map was formulated these attack models and review the existing counter measures in [9]. These earlier techniques for road network mix-zones to deal with them. We study the effectiveness of the mix- follow a straight forward refinement of basic mix-zones [5] by zones attacks through extensive experiments conducted using using rectangular or circular shaped zones. Both the definition traces produced by GTMobiSim [17] on different scales of and the construction methodologies of these mix-zones fail to geographic maps. take into account the effect of timing and transition attacks. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: We first The MobiMix road network mix-zones [14] are the first introduce the concept and definition of mix-zones in Section II to define and promote attack resilient road network mix- and provide an overview of various attacks to mix-zones in zones. The mix-zone construction process of MobiMix tries Section III. Then we introduce attack resilient mix-zone design to minimize the effect of attacks based on the characteristics and construction techniques and analyze the privacy strength of the underlying road network and at the same time provide of these attack resilient mix-zones against the set of attack an expected level of anonymity guarantee by taking into models described in Section III, including non-rectangular consideration of the statistics of user arrival rates and other road-network mix-zones and delay-tolerant mix-zones. We factors of the road network and mobility patterns. Finally, the highlight the effectiveness of our attack resilient mix-zones delay-tolerant mix-zones proposed in [15] is the first effort through experimental evaluation in Section V and conclude in that identifies the vulnerabilities of existing road network Section VI. mix-zones in the presence of continuous query correlation attacks (CQ attacks for short) and introduces techniques to II. MIX-ZONES effectively anonymize continuous location-based queries with In this section we introduce the concept and notations for delay-tolerant road network mix-zones. basic mix-zones and road network mix-zones. Several factors impact on the effectiveness of mix-zone A. Mix-zone concepts approaches, such as user population, mix-zone geometry, lo- cation sensing rate and spatial resolution, spatial and temporal A mix-zone of k participants refers to a k-anonymizaton constraints on user movement patterns as well as semantic region in which users can change their pseudonyms such that continuity of the information requested by the LBSs. Mix- the mapping between their old and new pseudonyms is not zones constructed on the road networks are vulnerable to revealed. In a mix-zone, a set of k users enter in some order timing and transition attacks due to the inherent nature of and change pseudonyms but none leave before all users enter the road network and the mobility patterns of the users. the mix-zone. Inside the mix-zone, the users do not report their Concretely, the timing information of users’ entry and exit locations and they exit the mix-zone in an order different from into the mix-zone provides information to launch a timing their order of arrival, thus, providing unlinkability between attack and the non-uniformity in the transitions taken at the their entering and exiting events. The properties of a mix- road intersection provides valuable information for a transition attack. Both of these attacks aid the attacker in guessing the mapping between the old and new pseudonyms. Mix-zones are also prone to CQ-attacks when the mobile clients obtain continuous query services.
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