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Towards Privacy Preserving Mobile Internet Communications – How Close Can We Get?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 7959))

Abstract

In today’s 3rd Generation mobile communications, some privacy concerns of mobile phone users are still not dealt with. Most prominent of these is the fact that mobile network operators learn both the identity and location of each device at any given time in order to be able to provide seamless services like telephony and internet access. In addition, the same information can leak to independent eavesdroppers using special equipment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility of a privacy preserving alternative. Our findings show that we can achieve anonymous internet access for mobile devices, and can build conditional privacy preserving persistent connections to service providers on top of it. As an alternative to mobile telephony, user-to-user mobile internet telephony providing improved but not optimal levels of privacy can be achieved under realistic assumptions, the limitations being due to traffic analysis attacks.

Funded by the Norwegian Research Council’s VERDIKT programme project 183195.

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Gjøsteen, K., Petrides, G., Steine, A. (2013). Towards Privacy Preserving Mobile Internet Communications – How Close Can We Get?. In: Boyd, C., Simpson, L. (eds) Information Security and Privacy. ACISP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7959. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39059-3_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39059-3_26

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39058-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39059-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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