Privacy-Enhancing Context Authentication from Location-Sensitive Data

Abstract

This paper proposes a new privacy-enhancing, context-aware user authentication system, ConSec, which uses a transformation of general location-sensitive data, such as GPS location, barometric altitude and noise levels, collected from the user's device, into a representation based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH). The resulting hashes provide a dimensionality reduction of the underlying data, which we leverage to model users' behaviour for authentication using machine learning. We present how ConSec supports learning from categorical and numerical data, while addressing a number of on-device and network-based threats. ConSec is implemented subsequently for the Android platform and evaluated using data collected from 35 users, which is followed by a security and privacy analysis. We demonstrate that LSH presents a useful approach for context authentication from location-sensitive data without directly utilising plain measurements. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Authentication; Privacy-preserving protocols; Mobile and wireless security.

ICMS: A Flexible Location-Based Access Control System for Mobile Devices

“…Moreover, some researchers focused on addressing the challenge of protecting the privacy of user location information in the context of LBAC [17]- [20], while others focused on addressing accuracy limitations in localization technologies and verifying the integrity of the reported location information [10], [15].…”