Skip to main content

A Game-Theoretical Approach to Data-Privacy Protection from Context-Based Inference Attacks: A Location-Privacy Protection Case Study

  • Conference paper
Secure Data Management (SDM 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5159))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

One of the approaches to the problem of data-privacy protection is given by the application of obfuscation techniques; in many situations, however, context information can help an attacker to perform inference over obfuscated data and to refine the estimate of the sensitive data up to a violation of the original privacy requirements. We consider the problem in a location privacy protection set-up where the sensitive attribute to be protected is the position of a Location Based Service user, and where the location anonymization technique is cloaking, whereas the context, supporting inference attacks, consists in some landscape-related information, namely positional constraints. In this work we adopt the assumption that the anonymizer and the attacker are two rational agents and frame the problem in a game theoretical approach by modeling the contest as a two-player, zero-sum, signaling game, then we point to the corresponding equilibrium solution and show that, when the anonymizer plays the equilibrium strategies, the advantage provided to the attacker by a non-neutral landscape gets canceled. We suggest that the game theoretical solution could be used as a reference solution for inter-technique comparisons.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Abraham, I., Dolev, D., Gonen, R., Halpern, J.: Distributed computing meets game theory: robust mechanisms for rational secret sharing and multiparty computation. In: PODC 2006: Proceedings of the twenty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing, pp. 53–62. ACM Press, New York (2006)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Ardagna, C.A., Cremonini, M., Damiani, E., De Capitani di Vimercati, S., Samarati, S.: Location privacy protection through obfuscation-based techniques. In: Barker, S., Ahn, G.-J. (eds.) Data and Applications Security 2007. LNCS, vol. 4602, pp. 47–60. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Beresford, A.R., Stajano, F.: Location privacy in pervasive computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing 2(1), 46–55 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Borel, E.: Traite du Calcul des Probabilites et ses Applications, vol. 4(2). Gautier-Villars, Paris (1938)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ettinger, M.: Steganalysis and game equilibria. In: Aucsmith, D. (ed.) IH 1998. LNCS, vol. 1525, pp. 319–328. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Farkas, C., Jajodia, S.: The inference problem: a survey. SIGKDD Explor. Newsl. 4(2), 6–11 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Fudenberg, D., Tirole, J.: Game Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Gruteser, M., Grunwald, D.: Anonymous usage of location-based services through spatial and temporal cloaking. In: MobiSys 2003: Proceedings of the 1st Int. Conf. on Mobile systems, applications and services, pp. 31–42 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Halpern, J., Teague, V.: Rational secret sharing and multiparty computation: extended abstract. In: STOC 2004: Proc. of the 36th annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing, pp. 623–632. ACM Press, New York (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Hengartner, U., Steenkiste, P.: Access control to information in pervasive computing environments. In: HOTOS 2003: Proc. of the 9th Conf. on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, Berkeley, CA, USA, p. 27. USENIX Association (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Liu, K., Kargupta, H., Das, K.: A game-theoretic approach toward multy-party privacy preserving distribute data mining. Technical Report TR-CS 01 07, Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, U.of Mariland (April 2007)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Zhang, W.Z.N., Chen, J.: Performance measurement for privacy preserving data mining. In: Ho, T.-B., Cheung, D., Liu, H. (eds.) PAKDD 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3518, pp. 43–49. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Samarati, P.: Protecting respondents’ identities in microdata release. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 13(6), 1010–1027 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. von Neumann, J., Morgenstern, O.: The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton University Press, Princeton (1944)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Willem Jonker Milan Petković

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Gianini, G., Damiani, E. (2008). A Game-Theoretical Approach to Data-Privacy Protection from Context-Based Inference Attacks: A Location-Privacy Protection Case Study. In: Jonker, W., Petković, M. (eds) Secure Data Management. SDM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5159. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85259-9_9

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85259-9_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85258-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85259-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics