System and Method for Preserving User Location Privacy to Defeat Latency-Based Geolocation

Existing privacy tools, like VPNs and Tor, protect you against IP-based tracking, where an attacker looks up your IP address in a database to find your location. However, a more advanced attacker can find you using latency-based geolocation, which ignores your IP address entirely. Unfortunately, standard VPNs and single-hop proxies cannot stop this. The attacker simply maps the location of the VPN server instead. If you keep using that same server, consistent speeds will eventually reveal your general region through timing patterns. Even advanced multi-hop networks like Tor still reveal the location of the final server and remain vulnerable to tracking through these timing patterns.

 

Researchers at Arizona State University and collaborators have developed an innovative technology that protects users from sophisticated geolocation attacks. Using a proprietary routing methodology, this system confuses adversaries ensuring that latency measurements from any single landmark reflect a mixture of paths rather than a single origin to prevent accurate location estimation. Further, it leverages secret sharing schemes for message reconstruction, thwarts statistical analysis, and complements existing privacy tools such as VPNs and Tor.

 

This technology provides a system that preserves user location privacy to thwart latency-based geolocation attacks.