Jano: specification and enforcement of location privacy in mobile and pervasive environments

Abstract

Today there are many location technologies providing people or object location. However, location privacy must be ensured before providing widely disseminated location services. Privacy rules may depend not only on the identity of the requester, but also on past events such as the places visited by the person being located, or previous location queries. So, location systems must support the specification and enforcement of security policies allowing users to specify when, how and who can know their location. We propose a middleware platform named Jano1 supporting both pull and push location requests while enforcing configurable security policies. Policies are specified using the Security Policy Language - SPL, facilitating the use of well known security models. In particular, Jano supports history-based policies applied to persons or objects location. The system was implemented with the integration of several location technologies (e.g. GPS, Bluetooth, etc.), and dealing with the heterogeneity aspects. It provides an interface that facilitates policy specification and has good performance.