Techu: Open and privacy-preserving crowdsourced GPS for the masses

Ioannis Agadakos, Jason Polakis, Georgios Portokalidis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

The proliferation of mobile devices, equipped with numerous sensors and Internet connectivity, has laid the foundation for the emergence of a diverse set of crowdsourcing services. By leveraging the multitude, geographical dispersion, and technical abilities of smartphones, these services tackle challenging tasks by harnessing the power of the crowd. One such service, Crowd GPS, has gained traction in the industry and research community alike, materializing as a class of systems that track lost objects or individuals (e.g., children or elders). While these systems can have significant impact, they suffer from major privacy threats. In this paper, we highlight the inherent risks to users from the centralized designs adopted by such services and demonstrate how adversaries can trivially misuse one of the most popular crowd GPS services to track their users. As an alternative, we present Techu, a privacy-preserving crowd GPS service for tracking Bluetooth tags. Our architecture follows a hybrid decentralized approach, where an untrusted server acts as a bulletin board that collects reports of tags observed by the crowd, while observers store the location information locally and only disclose it upon proof of ownership of the tag. Techu does not require user authentication, allowing users to remain anonymous. Our security analysis highlights the privacy offered by Techu, and details how our design prevents adversaries from tracking or identifying users. Finally, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that Techu has negligible impact on power consumption, and achieves superior effectiveness to previously proposed systems while offering stronger privacy guarantees.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMobiSys 2017 - Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
Pages475-487
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349284
DOIs
StatePublished - 16 Jun 2017
Event15th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2017 - Niagara Falls, United States
Duration: 19 Jun 201723 Jun 2017

Publication series

NameMobiSys 2017 - Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Conference

Conference15th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNiagara Falls
Period19/06/1723/06/17

Keywords

  • Ble tags
  • Crowd GPS
  • Location privacy
  • Location-based services
  • Privacy-preserving protocol
  • User tracking

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