MNPA: a mobile network privacy architecture

Abstract

This paper presents a mobile network privacy architecture (MNPA) that enables the provision of very strong user privacy against external and internal threats within mobile networks. The MNPA extends the mobile networking model with two new components. The first, privacy routing capability, enables untraceable communications between hosts. The second, privacy token issuing authority, is a third party application that manages the flow of MNPA user authorisation tokens in the system. The operations of these two components are detailed. We follow this by demonstrating how these components can be used to implement protocols for privacy enhanced network operations. New secure methods for location registration, remote host communication and billing are presented. We finish with a discussion of issues of collusion and trust within the architecture and look briefly at public key infrastructure requirements.