Slice it up: Unmasking User Identities in Smartwatch Health Data
Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/Report › Conference contribution › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Wearables are widely used for health data collection due to their availability and advanced sensors, enabling smart health applications like stress detection. However, the sensitivity of personal health data raises significant privacy concerns. While user de-identification by removing direct identifiers such as names and addresses is commonly employed to protect privacy, the data itself can still be exploited to re-identify individuals. We introduce a novel framework for similarity-based Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) re-identification attacks on time series health data. Using the WESAD dataset and two larger synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that even short segments of sensor data can achieve perfect re-identification with our Slicing-DTW-Attack. Our attack is independent of training data and computes similarity rankings in about 2 minutes for 10,000 subjects on a single CPU core. These findings highlight that de-identification alone is insufficient to protect privacy. As a defense, we show that adding random noise to the signals significantly reduces re-identification risk while only moderately affecting usability in stress detection tasks, offering a promising approach to balancing privacy and utility.
Details
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | ACM ASIA CCS 2025 - Proceedings of the 20th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Pages | 710-726 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| ISBN (electronic) | 9798400714108 |
| Publication status | Published - 24 Aug 2025 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Publication series
| Series | Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
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| ISSN | 1543-7221 |
Conference
| Title | 20th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security |
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| Abbreviated title | ASIACCS 2025 |
| Conference number | 20 |
| Duration | 25 - 29 August 2025 |
| Website | |
| Location | Meliá Hanoi |
| City | Ha Noi |
| Country | Viet Nam |
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- Attack, De-identification, Dynamic Time Warping, Privacy, Similarity, Time Series, User Re-identification