On the Transit Obfuscation Problem

Abstract

Concealing an intermediate point on a route or visible from a route is an important goal in some transportation and surveillance scenarios. This paper studies the Transit Obfuscation Problem, the problem of traveling from some start location to an end location while "covering" a specific transit point that needs to be concealed from adversaries. We propose the notion of transit anonymity, a quantitative guarantee of the anonymity of a specific transit point, even with a powerful adversary with full knowledge of the path planning algorithm. We propose and evaluate planning/search algorithms that satisfy this anonymity criterion.