STAMP: Enabling Privacy-Preserving Location Proofs for Mobile Users

Abstract— Location-based services are quickly becoming immensely popular. In addition to services based on users’ current location, many potential services rely on users’ location history, or their spatial-temporal provenance. Malicious users may lie about their spatial-temporal provenance without a carefully designed security system for users to prove their past locations. In this paper, we present the Spatial-Temporal provenance Assurance with Mutual Proofs (STAMP) scheme. STAMP is designed for ad-hoc mobile users generating location proofs for each other in a distributed setting. However, it can easily accommodate trusted mobile users and wireless access points. STAMP ensures the integrity and non-transferability of the location proofs and protects users’ privacy. A semi-trusted Certification Authority is used to distribute cryptographic keys as well as guard users against collusion by a light-weight entropy-based trust evaluation approach. Our prototype implementation on the Android plat-form shows that STAMP is low-cost in terms of computational and storage resources. Extensive simulation experiments show that our entropy-based trust model is able to achieve high (>0:9) collusion detection accuracy. As location-enabled mobile devices proliferate, location-based services are rapidly becoming immensely popular. Most of the current location-based services for mobile devices are based on users’ current location. Users discover their locations and share them with a server. < final year projects >