On Location Privacy in LTE Networks
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Authors
Roth, John D.
Tummala, Murali
McEachen, John C.
Scrofani, James W.
Subjects
Maximum-likelihood estimation
Cramér-Rao bound
position measurement
time of arrival estimation
cellular networks
privacy
Cramér-Rao bound
position measurement
time of arrival estimation
cellular networks
privacy
Advisors
Date of Issue
2017-01-20
Date
20 January 2017
Publisher
IEEE
Language
Abstract
Location privacy is an ever increasing concern as the pervasiveness of computing becomes more ubiquitous. This is especially apparent at the intersection of privacy, convenience, and quality of service in cellular networks. In this paper, we show the long term evolution (LTE) signaling plane to be vulnerable to location-based attacks via the timing advance (TA) parameter. To this end, we adapt the Cramér-Rao lower bound for timing advance-based estimation and show the associated estimator to be efficient. The analysis is complemented with numerical studies that feature synthetic and real-world data collected in existing LTE network deployments. Additionally, the Cellular Synchronization Assisted Refinement algorithm, a method of TA-based attack augmentation is examined. We show how it can simultaneously improve location resolution and negate the effects of poor network infrastructure geometry. The analysis and simulation demonstrate that a localization attack can yield resolution as high as 40 m.
Type
Article
Description
The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2017.2656470
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (Volume: 12 , Issue: 6 , June 2017)
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (Volume: 12 , Issue: 6 , June 2017)
Series/Report No
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Organization
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
11 p.
Citation
Roth, John D., et al. "On location privacy in LTE networks." IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 12.6 (2017): 1358-1368.
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.