Title
Privacy Against Statistical Matching: Inter-User Correlation
Abstract
Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve utility or be essential for the application to work (e.g., for ridesharing applications), the exposure of user data to the application presents a significant privacy threat to the users, even when the traces are anonymized, since the statistical matching of an anonymized trace to prior user behavior can identify a user and their habits. Because of the current and growing algorithmic and computational capabilities of adversaries, provable privacy guarantees as a function of the degree of anonymization and obfuscation of the traces are necessary. Our previous work has established the requirements on anonymization and obfuscation in the case that data traces are independent between users. However, the data traces of different users will be dependent in many applications, and an adversary can potentially exploit such. In this paper, we consider the impact of correlation between user traces on their privacy. First, we demonstrate that the adversary can readily identify the association graph, revealing which user data traces are correlated. Next, we demonstrate that the adversary can use this association graph to break user privacy with significantly shorter traces than in the case when traces are independent between users, and that independent obfuscation of the data traces is often insufficient to remedy such. Finally, we discuss how the users can employ dependency in their obfuscation to improve their privacy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/isit.2018.8437352
2018 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON INFORMATION THEORY (ISIT)
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Internet of Things (IoT), Privacy-Protection Mechanisms (PPM), Information Theoretic Privacy, Anonymization, Obfuscation, Inter-User Correlation
Conference
abs/1805.01296
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
ISIT 2018
3
0.39
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nazanin Takbiri1122.59
Amir Houmansadr261442.27
Dennis Goeckel3106069.96
Hossein Pishro-Nik442945.84