On the Effectiveness of k-Anonymity Against Traffic Analysis and Surveillance

Hopper, Nicholas; Vasserman, Eugene Y.

doi:10.1145/1179601.1179604

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On the Effectiveness of k-Anonymity Against Traffic Analysis and Surveillance

Hopper, Nicholas; Vasserman, Eugene Y.

The goal of most research on anonymity, including all currently used systems for anonymity, is to achieve anonymity through unlinkability: an adversary should not be able to determine the correspondence between the input and output messages of the system. An alternative anonymity goal is unobservability: an adversary should not be able to determine who sends and who receives messages. We study the effect of k-anonymity, a weak form of unobservability, on two types of attacks against systems that provide only unlinkability.

Keywords: Statistical disclosure; Mass surveillance; k-anonymity

Conference: Fifth ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, held in association with the 13th ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference, October 30, 2006, in Alexandria, VA CCS 2006
Starting Page: 9, Ending Page: 18

Date: 2006

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1179601.1179604

Record URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2097/20138

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