A middleware for location-based mobile applications with privacy protection

Network operators gradually open their interfaces to formerly hidden services. This fosters the development of a new class of mobile applications that take into account context information such as the location of users. However, the development of location-based services also raises the issue of users location-privacy. In this paper we introduce a service architecture that aims to overcome some of the shortages of currently existing context-aware applications by applying a novel pseudonym based privacy enhancing mechanism that is based on the notion of pseudonyms. This mechanism can even be applied on legacy mobile devices with restricted memory or processing power. Due to its flexibility many different kinds of applications are conceivable. One of the most important aspects in this respect is the highly postulated pay-as-you-go model. To illustrate our approach we demonstrate a transport ticket application that is extended by location-tracking functionality.

[1]  James P. Titus,et al.  Security and Privacy , 1967, 2022 IEEE Future Networks World Forum (FNWF).

[2]  M. Weiser.  The Computer for the Twenty-First Century , 1991 .

[3]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  Password authentication with insecure communication , 1981, CACM.

[4]  Marco Gruteser,et al.  USENIX Association , 1992 .

[5]  Georg Treu,et al.  Implicit Authorization for Social Location Disclosure , 2008, J. Softw..

[6]  Whitfield Diffie,et al.  New Directions in Cryptography , 1976, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[7]  Hugo Krawczyk,et al.  Keying Hash Functions for Message Authentication , 1996, CRYPTO.

[8]  Iris A. Junglas,et al.  A Research Model for Studying Privacy Concerns Pertaining to Location-Based Services , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[9]  Alfred Menezes,et al.  Handbook of Applied Cryptography , 2018 .

[10]  Yu Zhang,et al.  Preserving User Location Privacy in Mobile Data Management Infrastructures , 2006, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.