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IFIP Annual Conference on Data and Applications Security and Privacy

DBSec 2012: Data and Applications Security and Privacy XXVI pp 90–105Cite as

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Uniform Obfuscation for Location Privacy

Uniform Obfuscation for Location Privacy

  • Gianluca Dini17 &
  • Pericle Perazzo17 
  • Conference paper
  • 1977 Accesses

  • 8 Citations

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 7371)

Abstract

As location-based services emerge, many people feel exposed to high privacy threats. Privacy protection is a major challenge for such applications. A broadly used approach is perturbation, which adds an artificial noise to positions and returns an obfuscated measurement to the requester. Our main finding is that, unless the noise is chosen properly, these methods do not withstand attacks based on probabilistic analysis. In this paper, we define a strong adversary model that uses probability calculus to de-obfuscate the location measurements. Such a model has general applicability and can evaluate the resistance of a generic location-obfuscation technique. We then propose UniLO, an obfuscation operator which resists to such an adversary. We prove the resistance through formal analysis. We finally compare the resistance of UniLO with respect to other noise-based obfuscation operators.

Keywords

  • location-based services
  • privacy
  • obfuscation
  • perturbation
  • uniformity

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, via Diotisalvi 2, 56122, Pisa, Italy

    Gianluca Dini & Pericle Perazzo

Authors
  1. Gianluca Dini
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  2. Pericle Perazzo
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Télécom Bretagne, Campus de Rennes 2, rue de la Châtaigneraie, 35512, Cesson Sévigné Cedex, France

    Nora Cuppens-Boulahia, Frédéric Cuppens & Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro,  & 

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© 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

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Cite this paper

Dini, G., Perazzo, P. (2012). Uniform Obfuscation for Location Privacy. In: Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Cuppens, F., Garcia-Alfaro, J. (eds) Data and Applications Security and Privacy XXVI. DBSec 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7371. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31540-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31540-4_7

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31539-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31540-4

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