On non-cooperative location privacy: a game-theoretic analysis

In mobile networks, authentication is a required primitive of the majority of security protocols. However, an adversary can track the location of mobile nodes by monitoring pseudonyms used for authentication. A frequently proposed solution to protect location privacy suggests that mobile nodes collectively change their pseudonyms in regions called mix zones. Because this approach is costly, self-interested mobile nodes might decide not to cooperate and could thus jeopardize the achievable location privacy. In this paper, we analyze the non-cooperative behavior of mobile nodes with a game-theoretic model, where each player aims at maximizing its location privacy at a minimum cost. We first analyze the Nash equilibria in n-player complete information games. Because mobile nodes in a privacy-sensitive system do not know their opponents’ payoffs, we then consider incomplete information games. We establish that symmetric Bayesian-Nash equilibria exist with simple threshold strategies i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CCS
• Authors: Julien Freudiger, Mohammad Hossein Manshaei, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, David C. Parkes
• Keywords: CCS 2009, Location Privacy, Mobile Networks, Mobile Nodes, Security Privacy