Location Privacy without Carrier Cooperation

My paper Location Privacy without Carrier Cooperation, written in collaboration with Keen Sung and Brian Levine, has been accepted to the Mobile Security Technologies workshop, held as part of the IEEE Computer Society Security and Privacy Workshops, in conjunction with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

From the abstract:

Cellular network operators can track the location of cell phone users as they connect to different towers. Operators may not directly control the user’s phone, but they do supply and control the SIM card that identifies the user. We seek to preserve a cellular phone user’s location privacy from cellular network operators. We propose the ZipPhone protocol for secure, virtual, and therefore easily changeable SIM cards. ZipPhone breaks the association between the user and IMSI identifier, and thus prevents the cellular operator from localizing the user.