Location tracking mitigation for honest nodes and location estimation of uncooperative devices in wireless mobile networks

Abstract

Wireless mobile networks are on the cusp of actualizing revolutionary advances in many areas, including public safety. Vehicular communications, for example, can convey real-time, life-preserving notifications of impending collisions and other hazards, and thus reduce the daily carnage on our roads. To bolster public faith in mobile networks and ensure that these don’t fall prey to unscrupulous attackers, their security vulnerabilities must be exposed in a methodical fashion and suitably mitigated. Yet many novel wireless technologies face a difficult quandary in their need to meet two seemingly orthogonal requirements: network security and user privacy. Security measures must guarantee that the originators of broadcast messages are authorized, and that their transmissions have integrity and are non-repudiable. Concurrently, honest cooperative mobile devices must be assured of a reasonable degree of privacy without the threat of location tracking over time and space. We aim to harmonize wireless network security requirements with the preservation of location privacy by addressing three interdependent issues: the identification and assessment of serious risks to emerging wireless technologies; the mitigation of the location tracking threat in vehicular networks; and the localization of uncooperative wireless devices for the purpose of attack attribution or emergency assistance. Our contributions in reconciling security requisites with location privacy in wireless mobile networks are thus three-fold: 1. We conduct a threat analysis into the risks to vehicular networks and compare the results with known threats to wireless access technology in order to assess the security of mobile networks in general. We identify location tracking and insider attacks as critical threats. 2. We examine the risk of location tracking in vehicular networks, and propose a scheme to secure vulnerable broadcast messages while preserving driver anonymity. We find that our approach achieves this goal, with smaller message sizes and more computationally efficient cryptographic operations. 3. (i) We explore the threat posed by uncooperative mobile network devices,