Safeguarding location privacy in wireless ad-hoc networks

  • Authors:

  • Tanzima Hashem;Lars Kulik

  • Affiliations:

  • National ICT Australia, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia;National ICT Australia, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

  • Venue:
  • UbiComp '07 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We present a novel algorithm that safeguards the location privacy of users accessing location-based services via mobile devices. Our technique exploits the capability of mobile devices to form wireless ad-hoc networks in order to hide a user's identity and position. Local ad-hoc networks enable us to separate an agent's request for location information, the query initiator, from the agent that actually requests this service on its behalf, the query requestor. Since a query initiator can select itself or one of the k - 1 agents in its ad-hoc network as a query requestor, the query initiator remains k-anonymous. In addition, the location revealed to the location service provider is a rectangle instead of an exact coordinate. We develop an anonymous selection algorithm that selects a query requestor with near-uniform randomness, which is a key component to ensure anonymity in an ad-hoc network. Our experiments show that a system can ensure a high quality of service and maintain a high degree of privacy in terms of anonymity and obfuscation while accessing location-based services.