University of Washington

Gabriel Maganis

Tadayoshi Kohno

Arvind Krishnamurthy

Thomas Ristenpart

A privacy-preserving device-tracking system and method to assist in the recovery of lost or stolen Internet-connected mobile devices. The function of such a system seem contradictory, since it is desirable to hide a device's legitimately-visited locations from third-party services and other parties to achieve location privacy, while still enabling recovery of the device's location(s) after it goes missing by tracking the device to determine its location. An exemplary embodiment uses a DHT for storing encrypted location information and other forensic information in connection with indices that are successively determined based on initial pseudorandom seed information (i.e., state) that is retained by the owner of the device. Using the seed information, the software can determine indices mapped to location information stored after the device went missing, enabling the device to be located. Numerous extensions are discussed for the basic exemplary design that increase its suitability for particular deployment environments.

Growing community of inventors

Shoreline, WA, United States of America

Gabriel Maganis