Shadow attacks on users' anonymity in pervasive computing environments

Privacy preserving technologies are likely to become an essential component of adaptive services in pervasive and mobile computing. Although privacy issues have been studied for a long time in computer science as well as in other fields, most studies are focused on the release of data from large repositories. Mobile and pervasive computing pose new challenges, requiring specific formal models for attacks and new privacy preserving techniques. This paper considers a specific pervasive computing scenario, and shows that the application of state-of-the-art techniques for the anonymization of service requests is insufficient to protect the privacy of users. A specific class of attacks, called shadow attacks, is formally defined and a defense technique is proposed. This defense is formally proved to be correct, and its effectiveness is validated by extensive experiments in a simulated environment.