Privacy-preserving Location Tracking of Lost or Stolen Devices: Cryptographic Techniques and Replacing Trusted Third Parties with DHTs
Authors:
Thomas Ristenpart,
Gabriel Maganis,
Arvind Krishnamurthy, and
Tadayoshi Kohno
Abstract:
We tackle the problem
of building privacy-preserving device-tracking systems ---
or private methods to assist in the recovery of lost or stolen Internet-connected mobile devices.
The main goals of such systems are
seemingly contradictory: to hide the
device's legitimately-visited locations from
third-party services and other parties
(location privacy) while simultaneously
using those same services to help recover
the device's location(s) after it goes missing (device-tracking).
We propose a system, named Adeona, that nevertheless
meets both goals.
It provides strong guarantees of location privacy while
preserving the ability to efficiently
track missing devices.
We build a version of Adeona that uses OpenDHT as
the third party service, resulting in an immediately
deployable system that does
not rely on any single trusted third party.
We describe numerous extensions
for the basic design that
increase Adeona's suitability for particular
deployment environments.
References:
A preliminary version of this paper will appear in USENIX Security '08.
Proceedings Version:
Proceedings version of this paper is available as a pdf.
Project web page:
The source code for our system is available at http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/
List of Updates:
June 2008 - Put up proceedings version of paper.