Share the secret: Enabling location privacy in ubiquitous environments

Abstract

Anonymity and location privacy in mobile and pervasive environments has been receiving increasing attention during the last few years, and several mechanisms and architectures have been proposed to prevent "big brother" phenomena. In this paper we present a novel architecture to shield the location of a mobile user and preserve the anonymity on the service delivery. This architecture, called "Share the Secret - STS", uses totally un-trusted entities to distribute portions of anonymous location information, and authorizes other entities to combine these portions and derive the location of a user. STS simply divides the secret, and as a lightweight scheme it can be applied to network of nodes illustrating low processing and computational power, such as nodes of an ad-hoc network, smart gadgets and sensors. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.