Impact of Uplink Power Control on User Location Tracking Attacks in Cellular Networks

Abstract

Cellular networks have been successfully evolved over the decades. Especially, Long-Term Evolution (LTE) has been exceedingly successful and the security threats against LTE systems have increased rapidly. Particularly, tracking LTE user devices has been shown to be effective as the temporary user identifiers (IDs), which are used in LTE systems to indicate LTE user devices in the system, are easily extracted and used to locate targeted devices by passive eavesdroppers. In this paper, we investigate the impact of uplink power control on the probability of successful user tracking by an adversary whose location is unknown. We devise the notion of average inference error probability in order to measure the level of users' location privacy. Moreover, we derive the closed-form expression of the approximated average inference error probability and formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the average inference error probability under a constraint of an allowable power budget for each user. For defense, we propose a power control scheme able to effectively degrade an adversary's inference ability by 50% when 10 users are scheduled in each transmission time slot, which will result in almost 100% inference error at the adversary over multiple time slots.