A trusted infrastructure for facilitating access control of location information

The location information is critical for many location-aware applications and services. Recent efforts have resulted in a plethora of techniques to localize wireless devices. However, with the availability of the location information, privacy concerns are raised: by whom and when should the location information be accessed? In order to provide trusted access to the location information, in this work, we propose an infrastructure to regulate the access of the location information by enforcing that the mobile devices are only able to access the location information in a manner that conforms to their privileges. We presented both a centralized architecture as well as a fully decentralized enforcement mechanism. For the decentralized infrastructure, we proposed an on-node trusted component and developed the Neighbor ObseRvation Mechanism (NORM) for position verification of wireless devices. Further, the feasibility of our proposed infrastructure is evaluated through both simulation as well as a prototyping effort with a real-time indoor localization system.