Phantom: Physical Layer Cooperation For Location Privacy Protection

Localization techniques that allow inferring the location of wireless devices directly from received signals have exposed mobile users to new threats. Adversaries can easily collect required information (such as signal strength) from target users, however, techniques securing location information at the physical layer of the wireless communication systems have not received much attention. In this paper, we propose Phantom, a novel approach to allow mobile devices thwart unauthorized adversary's location tracking by creating forged locations. In particular, Phantom leverages cooperation among multiple mobile devices in close vicinity and utilizes synchronized transmissions among those nodes to obfuscate localization efforts of adversary systems. Through an implementation on software-defined radios (GNU Radios) and extensive simulation with real location traces, we see that Phantom can improve location privacy.