# Privacy-Enhancing Context Authentication from Location-Sensitive Data

## TL;DR

This paper introduces ConSec, a privacy-enhancing user authentication system that transforms location-sensitive data into hashes for secure, behavior-based authentication, evaluated on Android with promising privacy and security benefits.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel context-aware authentication method using locality-sensitive hashing to protect privacy while modeling user behavior from location data.

## Key findings

- Effective dimensionality reduction of location data
- Supports learning from categorical and numerical data
- Resistant to certain on-device and network threats

## Abstract

This paper proposes a new privacy-enhancing, context-aware user authentication system, ConSec, which uses a transformation of general location-sensitive data, such as GPS location, barometric altitude and noise levels, collected from the user's device, into a representation based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH). The resulting hashes provide a dimensionality reduction of the underlying data, which we leverage to model users' behaviour for authentication using machine learning. We present how ConSec supports learning from categorical and numerical data, while addressing a number of on-device and network-based threats. ConSec is implemented subsequently for the Android platform and evaluated using data collected from 35 users, which is followed by a security and privacy analysis. We demonstrate that LSH presents a useful approach for context authentication from location-sensitive data without directly utilising plain measurements.