AnonySense: Opportunistic and privacy-preserving context collection

Apu Kapadia, Nikos Triandopoulos, Cory Cornelius, Daniel Peebles, David Kotz

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

75 Scopus citations

Abstract

Opportunistic sensing allows applications to "task" mobile devices to measure context in a target region. For example, one could leverage sensor-equipped vehicles to measure traffic or pollution levels on a particular street, or users' mobile phones to locate (Bluetooth-enabled) objects in their neighborhood. In most proposed applications, context reports include the time and location of the event, putting the privacy of users at increased risk-even if a report has been anonymized, the accompanying time and location can reveal sufficient information to deanonymize the user whose device sent the report. We propose AnonySense, a general-purpose architecture for leveraging users' mobile devices for measuring context, while maintaining the privacy of the users.AnonySense features multiple layers of privacy protection-a framework for nodes to receive tasks anonymously, a novel blurring mechanism based on tessellation and clustering to protect users' privacy against the system while reporting context, and k-anonymous report aggregation to improve the users' privacy against applications receiving the context. We outline the architecture and security properties of AnonySense, and focus on evaluating our tessellation and clustering algorithm against real mobility traces.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPervasive Computing - 6th International Conference, Pervasive 2008, Proceedings
Pages280-297
Number of pages18
DOIs
StatePublished - 2008
Event6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Pervasive 2008 - Sydney, Australia
Duration: 19 May 200822 May 2008

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5013 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Pervasive 2008
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CitySydney
Period19/05/0822/05/08

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'AnonySense: Opportunistic and privacy-preserving context collection'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this