Demystifying Trajectory Recovery From Ash: An Open-Source Evaluation and Enhancement

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Hauptverfasser: D'Silva, Nicholas, Shahi, Toran, Husveg, Øyvind Timian Dokk, Sanjeeve, Adith, Buchholz, Erik, Kanhere, Salil S.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author D'Silva, Nicholas
Shahi, Toran
Husveg, Øyvind Timian Dokk
Sanjeeve, Adith
Buchholz, Erik
Kanhere, Salil S.
author_facet D'Silva, Nicholas
Shahi, Toran
Husveg, Øyvind Timian Dokk
Sanjeeve, Adith
Buchholz, Erik
Kanhere, Salil S.
contents Once analysed, location trajectories can provide valuable insights beneficial to various applications. However, such data is also highly sensitive, rendering them susceptible to privacy risks in the event of mismanagement, for example, revealing an individual's identity, home address, or political affiliations. Hence, ensuring that privacy is preserved for this data is a priority. One commonly taken measure to mitigate this concern is aggregation. Previous work by Xu et al. shows that trajectories are still recoverable from anonymised and aggregated datasets. However, the study lacks implementation details, obfuscating the mechanisms of the attack. Additionally, the attack was evaluated on commercial non-public datasets, rendering the results and subsequent claims unverifiable. This study reimplements the trajectory recovery attack from scratch and evaluates it on two open-source datasets, detailing the preprocessing steps and implementation. Results confirm that privacy leakage still exists despite common anonymisation and aggregation methods but also indicate that the initial accuracy claims may have been overly ambitious. We release all code as open-source to ensure the results are entirely reproducible and, therefore, verifiable. Moreover, we propose a stronger attack by designing a series of enhancements to the baseline attack. These enhancements yield higher accuracies by up to 16%, providing an improved benchmark for future research in trajectory recovery methods. Our improvements also enable online execution of the attack, allowing partial attacks on larger datasets previously considered unprocessable, thereby furthering the extent of privacy leakage. The findings emphasise the importance of using strong privacy-preserving mechanisms when releasing aggregated mobility data and not solely relying on aggregation as a means of anonymisation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14645
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Demystifying Trajectory Recovery From Ash: An Open-Source Evaluation and Enhancement
D'Silva, Nicholas
Shahi, Toran
Husveg, Øyvind Timian Dokk
Sanjeeve, Adith
Buchholz, Erik
Kanhere, Salil S.
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Once analysed, location trajectories can provide valuable insights beneficial to various applications. However, such data is also highly sensitive, rendering them susceptible to privacy risks in the event of mismanagement, for example, revealing an individual's identity, home address, or political affiliations. Hence, ensuring that privacy is preserved for this data is a priority. One commonly taken measure to mitigate this concern is aggregation. Previous work by Xu et al. shows that trajectories are still recoverable from anonymised and aggregated datasets. However, the study lacks implementation details, obfuscating the mechanisms of the attack. Additionally, the attack was evaluated on commercial non-public datasets, rendering the results and subsequent claims unverifiable. This study reimplements the trajectory recovery attack from scratch and evaluates it on two open-source datasets, detailing the preprocessing steps and implementation. Results confirm that privacy leakage still exists despite common anonymisation and aggregation methods but also indicate that the initial accuracy claims may have been overly ambitious. We release all code as open-source to ensure the results are entirely reproducible and, therefore, verifiable. Moreover, we propose a stronger attack by designing a series of enhancements to the baseline attack. These enhancements yield higher accuracies by up to 16%, providing an improved benchmark for future research in trajectory recovery methods. Our improvements also enable online execution of the attack, allowing partial attacks on larger datasets previously considered unprocessable, thereby furthering the extent of privacy leakage. The findings emphasise the importance of using strong privacy-preserving mechanisms when releasing aggregated mobility data and not solely relying on aggregation as a means of anonymisation.
title Demystifying Trajectory Recovery From Ash: An Open-Source Evaluation and Enhancement
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14645