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

Hopper, Nicholas; Vasserman, Eugene Y.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/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://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2006/

Article (publisher version)

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

Rights: Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. WPES’06, October 30, 2006, Alexandria, Virginia, USA. Copyright 2006 ACM 1-59593-556-8/06/0010 ...$5.00.

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