Enhancing Privacy in LTE Paging System using Physical Layer Identication

Tuan Ta and J. S. Baras

To appear in the proceedings of the Data Privacy Management 7th International Workshop co-located with ESORICS 2012, pp. no. 15-28, Pisa, Italy, September 13-14, 2012.

Abstract

User location privacy is a growing concern in cellular networks. It has been recently shown that the paging architecture in GSM networks leaks user location information. In this paper, we rst prove theoretically that LTE networks also have the same vulnerability. We then propose a solution making use of a novel signal processing tech nique, physical layer identication. The idea is to embed users' unique tags onto the downlink paging signal waveforms such that the tags are stealth and robust. We show that our scheme not only improves users' privacy, but also saves system bandwidth.

Keywords: LTE, location privacy, physical layer identication, paging