Attacking unlinkability: the importance of context

  • Authors:
  • Matthias Franz;Bernd Meyer;Andreas Pashalidis

  • Affiliations:
  • Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, München, Germany;Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, München, Germany;NEC Europe Ltd, Network Laboratories, Heidelberg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • PET'07 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Privacy enhancing technologies
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

A system that protects the unlinkability of certain data items (e. g. identifiers of communication partners, messages, pseudonyms, transactions, votes) does not leak information that would enable an adversary to link these items. The adversary could, however, take advantage of hints from the context in which the system operates. In this paper, we introduce a new metric that enables one to quantify the (un)linkability of the data items and, based on this, we consider the effect of some simple contextual hints.