Boffins propose Pretty Good Phone Privacy to end pretty invasive location data harvesting by telcos

guest · Aug 12, 2021

Boffins propose Pretty Good Phone Privacy to end pretty invasive location data harvesting by telcos
August 11, 2021
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/11/phone_location_masking/

Computer science boffins have devised a way to prevent the location of mobile phone users from being snarfed and sold to marketers, though the technique won't affect targeted nation-state surveillance.

"We solve something that had previously been thought impossible – achieving location privacy in mobile networks," Paul Schmitt, an associate research scholar at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University, told The Register.
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In "Pretty Good Phone Privacy," [PDF] a paper scheduled to be presented on Thursday at the Usenix Security Symposium, Schmitt and Barath Raghavan, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, describe a way to re-engineer the mobile network software stack so that it doesn't betray the location of mobile network customers.

"We show how it's possible to protect users' mobile privacy while at the same time providing normal connectivity, and to do so without changing any of the hardware in mobile networks."
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Schmitt and Raghavan describe a new logical network entity called the Pretty Good Phone Privacy Gateway (PGPPGW), which sits between public internet and the UPF (User Plane Function), the gateway that provides global IP connectivity from the network core.

The purpose of Pretty Good Phone Privacy (PGPP) is to avoid using a unique identifier for authenticating customers and granting access to the network.

"We decouple network connectivity from authentication and billing, which allows the carrier to run Next Generation Core (NGC) services that are unaware of the identity or location of their users but while still authenticating them for network use," the paper explains.
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Boffins propose Pretty Good Phone Privacy to end pretty invasive location data harvesting by telcos

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