Protecting Location Privacy from Untrusted Wireless Service Providers Keen Sung Brian Levine Mariya Zheleva University of Massachusetts Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst University at Albany, SUNY
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION Access to mobile wireless networks has become critical for day- When mobile users connect to the Internet, they authenticate to a to-day life. However, it also inherently requires that a user’s geo- cell tower, allowing service providers such as Verizon and AT&T graphic location is continuously tracked by the service provider. to store a log of the time, radio tower, and user identity [69]. As It is challenging to maintain location privacy, especially from the providers have advanced towards the current fifth generation of provider itself. To do so, a user can switch through a series of iden- cellular networks, the density of towers has grown, allowing these tifiers, and even go offline between each one, though it sacrifices logs to capture users’ location with increasing precision. Many users utility. This strategy can make it difficult for an adversary to per- are persistently connected, apprising providers of their location all form location profiling and trajectory linking attacks that match day. Connecting to a large private Wi-Fi network provides similar observed behavior to a known user. information to its administrators. And some ISPs offer cable, cellular, In this paper, we model and quantify the trade-off between utility and Wi-Fi hotspots as a unified package. and location privacy. We quantify the privacy available to a com- While fixed user identifiers are useful in supporting backend munity of users that are provided wireless service by an untrusted services such as postpaid billing, wireless providers’ misuse of provider.