Quantifying Location Privacy in Urban Next-Generation Cellular Networks

Abstract

With urbanization and cellular subscribership rising sharply, cellular use in urban locales has become a normative behavior for the majority of the world’s population. As the research community pushes the limits of what is possible in the next generation cellular arena, it is prudent to simultaneously hold in tension the responsibility to provide appropriate protections to the ultimate end users of such technology. To this end, this research illustrates a location-based attack in modern cellular networks. This attack leverages control information sent over the radio access network without the benefit of encryption. We show how this attack is particularly potent in urban localization where it is important to infer location in three dimensions. We quantify the efficacy of such an attack, and therefore the associated location privacy, through simulation both in a generic cellular environment and in an environment modeled after downtown Honolulu. Our results show that accuracy on the order of 15 meters is possible.