Presentation: Location Assurance and Privacy in Location-based Services

When: Feb. 16, 2017, 10:00-11:00

Where: Ravelijn 2503

Who: Jun Pang, U Luxembourg

Due to the development of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), people are able to obtain their precise locations in real time. This in turn leads to a wide range of location-based services (LBS), through which a user can acquire information customised to locations. However, the vulnerabilities of GNSS systems and the exposure of information such as locations and queries in LBS requests impose a strong need from users on security. In this talk, I mainly discuss two security requirements in LBSs: location assurance and privacy. Location assurance expresses users’ requirement for trustworthy locations while privacy addresses users’ concern about personal information leakage in LBSs. For location assurance, I present a trust framework to detect spoofing by evaluating the integrity of GNSS signals. The framework combines existing spoofing detection methods to generate an overall quantitative evaluation of the integrity of received signals. For location privacy, I describe a new model for mobility profiles and a new tracking attack to infer users’ activities directly. I will shortly discuss a general approach to protect users’ query privacy when the adversary has access to various contextual information, and mention a few other results on location-based social networks.