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ORCID
N/A
Access Type
Open Access Thesis
Document Type
thesis
Degree Program
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Degree Type
Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering (M.S.E.C.E.)
Year Degree Awarded
2017
Month Degree Awarded
February
Abstract
The popularity of mobile devices and location-based services (LBS) have created great concerns regarding the location privacy of the users of such devices and services. Anonymization is a common technique that is often being used to protect the location privacy of LBS users. This technique assigns a random pseudonym to each user and these pseudonyms can change over time. Here, we provide a general information theoretic definition for perfect location privacy and prove that perfect location privacy is achievable for mobile devices when using the anonymization technique appropriately. First, we assume that the user’s current location is independent from her past locations. Using this i.i.d model, we show that if the pseudonym of the user is changed before O(n2/(r−1)) number of anonymized observations is made by the adversary for that user, then she has perfect location privacy, where n is the number of users in the network and r is the number of all possible locations that the user might occupy. Then, we model each user’s movement by a Markov chain so that a user’s current location depends on his previous locations, which is a more realistic model when approximating real world data. We show that perfect location privacy is achievable in this model if the pseudonym of the user is changed before O(n2/(|E|−r)) anonymized observations is collected by the adversary for that user where |E| is the number of edges in the user’s Markov model.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/9501507
First Advisor
Hossein Pishro-Nik
Second Advisor
Amir Houmansa
Third Advisor
Dennis Goeckel
Recommended Citation
Montazeri, Zarrin, "Achieving Perfect Location Privacy in Wireless Devices Using Anonymization" (2017). Masters Theses. 478.
https://doi.org/10.7275/9501507
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/478