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A Privacy-Preserving Device Tracking System Using a Low-Power Wide-Area Network

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Cryptology and Network Security (CANS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11261))

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Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of a low-power privacy-preserving device tracking system based on Internet of Things (IOT) technology. The system consists of low-power nodes and a set of dedicated beacons. Each tracking node broadcasts pseudonyms and encrypted versions of observed beacon identifiers over a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN). Unlike most commercial systems, our solution ensures that the device owners are the only ones who can locate their devices. We present a detailed design and validate the result with a prototype implementation that considers power and energy consumption as well as side-channel attacks. Our implementation uses Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) technology for secure key-storage in an innovative way. We build and evaluate a complete demonstrator with off-the-shelf IoT nodes, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, and LoRa long distance communication (LPWAN). We validate the setup for a bicycle tracking application and also estimate the requirements for a low-cost ASIC node.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://forum.pycom.io/topic/1022/root-causes-of-high-deep-sleep-current.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback, as well as Patrick Tague for acting as our shepherd. This work is the result of collaborative research partially funded by the Attached Institute of ETRI. It was also supported in part by the KU Leuven Research Council through C16/15/058, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 644052 HECTOR and No 644371 WITDOM, ERC Advanced Grant 695305. Pieter Maene is an SB PhD fellow at Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. imec-COSIC KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Tomer Ashur, Jeroen Delvaux, Pieter Maene, Eduard Marin, Svetla Nikova, Oscar Reparaz, Vladimir Rožić, Dave Singelée, Bohan Yang & Bart Preneel

  2. The Attached Institute of ETRI, 1559, Yuseong-daero, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 34044, South Korea

    Sanghan Lee

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  1. Tomer Ashur
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Correspondence to Pieter Maene .

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  1. ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Srdjan Capkun

  2. Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

    Sherman S. M. Chow

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Ashur, T. et al. (2018). A Privacy-Preserving Device Tracking System Using a Low-Power Wide-Area Network. In: Capkun, S., Chow, S. (eds) Cryptology and Network Security. CANS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11261. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02641-7_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02641-7_16

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