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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3469-4157

AccessType

Open Access Dissertation

Document Type

dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Year Degree Awarded

2020

Month Degree Awarded

May

First Advisor

Hossein Pishro-Nik

Second Advisor

Dennis L. Goeckel

Third Advisor

Amir Houmansadr

Fourth Advisor

Marco F. Duarte

Subject Categories

Electrical and Computer Engineering | Systems and Communications

Abstract

Modern applications significantly enhance the user experience by adapting to each user's individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve a user's experience or be essential for the application to work, 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. This dissertation focuses on deriving the theoretical bounds on the privacy of users in such a scenario. Here we derive the fundamental limits of user privacy when both anonymization and obfuscation-based protection mechanisms are applied to users' time series of data. We investigate the impact of such mechanisms on the trade-off between privacy protection and user utility. In the first part, the requirements on anonymization and obfuscation in the case that data traces are independent between users are obtained. However, the data traces of different users will be dependent in many applications, and an adversary can potentially exploit such. So in the next part, we consider the impact of dependency between user traces on their privacy. In order to do that, we demonstrate that the adversary can readily identify the association graph of the obfuscated and anonymized version of the data, revealing which user data traces are dependent, and then, we demonstrate that the adversary can use this association graph to break user privacy with significantly shorter traces than in the case of independent users. As a result, we show inter-user dependency degrades user privacy. We show that obfuscating data traces independently across users is often insufficient to remedy such leakage. Therefore, we discuss how users can improve privacy by employing joint obfuscation that removes the data dependency. Finally, we discuss how the remapping technique came to our help to improve user utility and how much remapping is leaking to the adversary when the adversary does not have the full prior information.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/16097059

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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