LOCATION BROKERING FOR PROVIDING SECURITY, PRIVACY AND SERVICES

摘要

Location brokering technique embodiments are presented that employ sensor data captured by a user's mobile device to determine the device's location, encrypt the location data and store it in a database. The location data is encrypted in such a way that it is possible to determine when a user's mobile device is currently in the same vicinity as another user's mobile device who is a member of the same group as the first user. However, the actual location and relative mobility or immobility of the users cannot be ascertained except by the users themselves via a decryption procedure or by trusted components. Services are provided can read the stored encrypted location data, processes it to determine if group members are in the same vicinity, and either respond to user queries about the location of other members of a group the user belongs to, or push this information to appropriate users.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented process for obtaining location information concerning mobile computing devices each of which is associated with a user, comprising:
using a mobile computing device associated with a first user to perform the following process actions: receiving one or more neighbor tuples from a location service, wherein each neighbor tuple comprises an encrypted location message comprising at least an encryption of the location of a communication-enabled device; for each received neighbor tuple,
obtaining a decryption key capable of decrypting the encrypted location message of the received neighbor tuple under consideration from a set of decryption keys known to the mobile computing device associated with a first user,decrypting the encrypted location message found in the received neighbor tuple under consideration via a decryption scheme corresponding to the encryption scheme used to encrypt the location message, using the obtained decryption key, andoutputting the location of the communication-enabled device found in the decrypted location message, and a user identifier identifying a user associated with that communication-enabled device.