Localization to Enhance Security and Services in Wi-Fi Networks under Privacy Constraints

Ayres, Gareth and Mehmood, Rashid and Mitchell, Keith and Race, Nicholas J. P. (2009) Localization to Enhance Security and Services in Wi-Fi Networks under Privacy Constraints. In: Communications Infrastructure. Systems and Applications in Europe :. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 16 . Springer-Verlag, GBR, pp. 175-188. ISBN 978-3-642-11283-6

Abstract

Developments of seamless mobile services are faced with two broad challenges, systems security and user privacy - access to wireless systems is highly insecure due to the lack of physical boundaries and, secondly, location based services (LBS) could be used to extract highly sensitive user information. In this paper, we describe our work on developing systems which exploit location information to enhance security and services under privacy constraints. We describe two complimentary methods which we have developed to track node location information within production University Campus Networks comprising of large numbers of users. The location data is used to enhance security and services. Specifically, we describe a method for creating geographic firewalls which allows us to restrict and enhance services to individual users within a specific containment area regardless of physical association. We also report our work on LBS development to provide visualization of spatio-temporal node distribution under privacy considerations.