Publication No 36403

Author(s)

Hauser, C.*

Title

Mobility Management Meets Privacy - the Failure of Existing Proposals and a New, Future-Proof Approach (Extended Version)

Topics

Mobile Communications

Keywords

PRIVACY; MOBILITY MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Protection of user privacy will gain increasing importance in future mobile systems. This is due to the trend to context-awareness as well as to open systems in terms of publicly available interfaces and of an open provider model. To meet the users' privacy needs the approach to allow them to act under several different pseudonyms or personas is promising. Crucial attacks on this approach are the linking of different pseudonyms of a user and the inference of knowledge that the user wants to conceal in the context of a pseudonym. Both attacks can be executed with application knowledge as well as with information originating from the communication process itself. Here, mobility management plays a central role as it reflects the user's behavior. Thus, privacy protection by multiple pseudonyms can only be successful if the communication system, in particular mobility management, is privacy-aware. In this paper, the threats to the approach of multiple pseudonyms resulting from IP-based mobility management is analyzed. Existing proposals are evaluated and it is shown, that they do not offer sufficient protection. At the end, an outlook to a new approach to mobility management protecting multiple pseudonyms is given.

Year

2004

Reference entry

Hauser, C.
Mobility Management Meets Privacy - the Failure of Existing Proposals and a New, Future-Proof Approach (Extended Version)
Report, IKR, Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, August 2004

BibTex file

Download  [BIBTEX]

Full Text

Download  [PDF]