Location Privacy via Private Proximity Testing

Abstract

We study privacy-preserving tests for proximity: Alice can test if she is close to Bob without either party revealing any other information about their location. We describe several secure protocols that support private proximity testing at various levels of granularity. We study the use of “location tags” generated from the physical environment in order to strengthen the security of proximity testing. We implemented our system on the Android platform and report on its effectiveness. Our system uses a social network (Facebook) to manage user public keys.