Geoprivacy protocols

The advent of ubiquitous devices and the growing development of location-based services have led to a large scale collection of individuals’ mobility data on a daily basis. Among all the Personally Identifiable Information, learning the location of an individual is one of the major threats against privacy. In order to help location-based services developers to provide privacy-preserving applications, we propose the PROPS protocol, a PRivacy-preserving lOcation Proof System that allows a user to generate a proof of his location in a private way using neighboring nodes as witnesses. The gathered proof can be used to anonymously prove his current or past location.

A secure location-based service requires that a mobile user certifies his position before gaining access to a particular resource. Currently, most of existing solutions assume a trusted third party that can vouch for the position claimed by a user. However, as computation and communication capacities become ubiquitous with the large-scale adoption of smartphones by individuals, we propose to leverage on these resources to solve this issue in a collaborative and private manner. We have demonstrated that our protocol provides security properties such as the unforgeability and the non-transferability of the proofs, as well as resistance to classical attacks on such systems like mafia and terrorist frauds.

A Privacy-preserving location proof system

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