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International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Systems

SecureComm 2011: Security and Privacy in Communication Networks pp 96–115Cite as

Location Privacy and Attacker Knowledge: Who Are We Fighting against?

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Abstract

Location privacy research has received wide attention in the past few years owing to the growing popularity of location-based applications, and the skepticism thereof on the collection of location information. A large section of this research is directed towards mechanisms based on location obfuscation. The primary motivation for this engagement comes from the relatively well researched area of database privacy. Researchers in this sibling domain have indicated multiple times that any notion of privacy is incomplete without explicit statements on the capabilities of an attacker. The question we ask in the context of location privacy is whether the attacker we are fighting against exists or not. In this paper, we provide a classification of attacker knowledge, and explore what implication does a certain form of knowledge has on location privacy. We argue that the use of cloaking regions can adversely impact the preservation of privacy in the presence of approximate location knowledge, and demonstrate how perturbation based mechanisms can instead be useful.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Denver, Denver, CO, 80208, USA

    Rinku Dewri

Authors
  1. Rinku Dewri
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. City University London, 10 Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB, London, UK

    Muttukrishnan Rajarajan

  2. Royal Holloway University of London, TW20 0EX, Egham Hill, UK

    Fred Piper

  3. College of William and Mary, P.O. Box 8795, 23187, Williamsburg, VA, USA

    Haining Wang

  4. Pennsylvania State University, 338J IST Buillding, 16802, University Park, PA, USA

    George Kesidis

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© 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Dewri, R. (2012). Location Privacy and Attacker Knowledge: Who Are We Fighting against?. In: Rajarajan, M., Piper, F., Wang, H., Kesidis, G. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2011. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 96. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31909-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31909-9_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31908-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31909-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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