A paper authored by Tanzima Hashem and myself on Safeguarding Location Privacy in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks has been accepted for Ubicomp 2007. The full citation is under my publications.
Abstract
We present a novel algorithm that safeguards the location privacy of users accessing location-based services via mobile devices. Our technique exploits the capability of mobile devices to form wireless ad-hoc networks in order to hide a user’s identity and position. Local ad-hoc networks enable us to separate an agent’s request for location information, the query initiator, from the agent that actually requests this service on its behalf, the query requestor. Since a query initiator can select itself or one of the k − 1 agents in its ad-hoc network as a query requestor, the query initiator remains k-anonymous. In addition, the location revealed to the location service provider is a rectangle instead of an exact coordinate. We develop an anonymous selection algorithm that selects a query requestor with near-uniform randomness, which is a key component to ensure anonymity in an ad-hoc network. Our experiments show that a system can ensure a high quality of service and maintain a high degree of privacy in terms of anonymity and obfuscation while accessing location-based services.