A Distributed Location Trusted Service Achieving k-Anonymity against the Global Adversary

Buccafurri, Francesco; Angelis, Vincenzo De; Idone, Maria Francesca; Labrini, Cecilia

doi:10.1109/mdm52706.2021.00029

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…There, a distributed user needs to initiate the LBS query by applying privacy-preserving techniques himself (e.g., cloaking [14], dummy generation [15], k-anonymity [16] [17] and differential privacy [18] [19]). However, such approaches may incur high overhead on the individual.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Location Privacy Protection Game Against Adversary Through Multi-User Cooperative Obfuscation

Hong

Duan

2024

IEEE Trans. on Mobile Comput.

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In location-based services(LBSs), it is promising for users to crowdsource and share their Point-of-Interest(PoI) information with each other in a common cache to reduce query frequency and preserve location privacy. Yet most studies on multi-user privacy preservation overlook the opportunity of leveraging their service flexibility. This paper is the first to study multiple users' strategic cooperation against an adversary's optimal inference attack, by leveraging mutual service flexibility. We formulate the multi-user privacy cooperation against the adversary as a max-min adversarial game and solve it in a linear program. Unlike the vast literature, even if a user finds the cached information useful, we prove it beneficial to still query the platform to further confuse the adversary. As the linear program's computational complexity still increases superlinearly with the number of users' possible locations, we propose a binary obfuscation scheme in two opposite spatial directions to achieve guaranteed performance with only constant complexity. Perhaps surprisingly, a user with a greater service flexibility should query with a less obfuscated location to add confusion. Finally, we provide guidance on the optimal query sequence among LBS users. Simulation results show that our crowdsourced privacy protection scheme greatly improves users' privacy as compared with existing approaches.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Location Privacy Protection Game Against Adversary Through Multi-User Cooperative Obfuscation

Hong

Duan

2024

IEEE Trans. on Mobile Comput.

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Stealthy Messaging: Leveraging Message Queuing Telemetry Transport for Covert Communication Channels

Lazzaro,

Buccafurri

2024

Applied Sciences

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Covert channel methods are techniques for improving privacy and security in network communications. These methods consist of embedding secret data within normal network channels, making it more difficult for unauthorized parties to detect such data. This paper presents a new approach for creating covert channels using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, widely used in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). The proposed method exploits storage channels by altering the field length of MQTT messages. Our solution leverages well-known one-way mathematical functions to ensure that data remain hidden from third parties observing the MQTT stream. In this way, we ensure that not only the content of the communication is preserved but also that the communication itself takes place. We conducted a security analysis to show that our solution offers the above-mentioned property even against severe threats, such as an adversary being able to observe all the messages exchanged in the network (even in the clear). Finally, we conducted an overhead analysis of our solution both in terms of the time required to perform the required operations and of the bytes to send. Our study shows that our solution adds no significant time overhead, and the additional overhead in terms of transmitted bytes remains within acceptable limits.

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A Distributed Location Trusted Service Achieving k-Anonymity against the Global Adversary

Cited by 2 publications

References 16 publications

Location Privacy Protection Game Against Adversary Through Multi-User Cooperative Obfuscation

Location Privacy Protection Game Against Adversary Through Multi-User Cooperative Obfuscation

Stealthy Messaging: Leveraging Message Queuing Telemetry Transport for Covert Communication Channels

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