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Effective mix-zone anonymization techniques for mobile travelers

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Abstract

Mix-zones are recognized as an alternative and complementary approach to spatial cloaking based location privacy protection. Unlike spatial cloaking techniques that perturb the location resolution through location k-anonymization, mix-zones break the continuity of location exposure by ensuring that users’ movements cannot be traced while they are inside a mix-zone. In this paper we provide an overview of some known attacks that make mix-zones on road networks vulnerable and discuss a set of counter measures to make road network mix-zones attack-resilient. Concretely, we categorize the vulnerabilities of road network mix-zones into two classes: one due to the road network characteristics and user mobility, and the other due to the temporal, spatial and semantic correlations of location queries. We propose efficient road network mix-zone construction techniques that are resilient to attacks based on road network characteristics. Furthermore, we enhance the road network mix-zone framework with the concept of delay-tolerant mix-zones that introduce a combination of spatial and temporal shifts in the location exposure of the users to achieve higher anonymity. We study the factors that impact on the effectiveness of each of these attacks and evaluate the efficiency of the counter measures through extensive experiments on traces produced by GTMobiSim at different scales of geographic maps.

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Notes

  1. The mobile networking service provider has access to the user location information through techniques such as cell tower triangulation.

  2. For the sake of example simplicity, we assume that the users take the average time of 4 s to cross the mix-zone, in a real road intersection, it could actually take slightly longer or shorter time to cross based on the speed of travel.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially sponsored by grants from NSF CISE NetSE program, SaTC program, and a grant from Intel ISTC on Cloud Computing and also by an IBM PhD fellowship for the first author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Balaji Palanisamy

  2. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

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  1. Balaji Palanisamy
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  2. Ling Liu
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Correspondence to Balaji Palanisamy.

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Palanisamy, B., Liu, L. Effective mix-zone anonymization techniques for mobile travelers. Geoinformatica 18, 135–164 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-013-0194-y

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