Anonymous Proximity Beacons from Smartphones

Abstract

This project investigates the usage of Bluetooth-enabled smartphones for privacy-preserving human proximity detection. Smartphones can transmit identifiers which can be heard by other smartphones nearby. A naive solution where each smartphone continually transmits a fixed identifier would make it trivial for a third party to track users; this project explores a solution for Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth 5 to make tracking difficult by using mutable pseudo-anonymous identifiers that can only be reversed by a de-anonymisation server. An example application is developed: the server can return location information to requesting users, emulating the functionality of static proximity beacon systems—except without the deployment costs.