On Location Privacy in LTE Networks
Abstract: Location privacy is an ever increasing concern as the pervasiveness of computing becomes more ubiquitous. This is especially apparent at the intersection of privacy, convenience, and quality of service in cellular networks. In this paper, we show the long term evolu on (LTE) signaling plane to be vulnerable to loca onon based a acks via the ming advance (TA) parameter. To this end,, we adapt the CramĂŠr-Rao Rao lower bound for timing advance advance-based based estimation and show the associated estimator to be efficient. The analysis is complemented with numerical studies that feature synthetic and real real-world world data collected in existing LTE network deployments. Additionally, the Cellular Synchronization Assisted Refinement algorithm, a method of TA TA-based based attack augmentation is examined. We show how it can simultaneously improve location resolution and negate the effects of poor network infrastructure geometry. The analysis and simulation demonstrate that a localization attack can yield resolution as high as 40 m.