LOCA - A Location-Oblivious Cellular Architecture

Explore a groundbreaking conference talk from NSDI '23 that introduces LOCA, a novel cellular architecture designed to protect user location privacy without compromising identity-based services. Delve into the challenges of reconciling privacy with operators' needs for providing essential services based on user identity. Learn how LOCA, applicable to emerging MVNO-based cellular architectures, uses a virtual operator as a broker between users and infrastructure operators. Discover the combination of formal analysis, simulation, prototype implementation, and wide-area experiments used to demonstrate LOCA's provable privacy guarantees and scalability to realistic deployment figures. Gain insights into this innovative approach that aims to revolutionize cellular networks by preventing cellular operators from profiling users based on their identity and location information.