Using the GPS To Provide Location Based Security

Data security is an issue in today’s Internet where people always find ways to crack into computers and steal secrets locked up by cryptographic algorithms. Let’s say you want to make an online payment to an e-commerce site, have you ever wondered if some body can crack and steal your credit card information? And if so, do you know where they are? Of course not.  It is interesting how we can cause a lot of trouble in the Internet and no body knows where we are physically.  Then how can we solve this problem in the Internet? Can we guarantee that the messages we communicate can only be available to a specific “physical” location like inside a corporation or a government agency? Well there is a new cool encryption scheme that came up recently which uses GPS satellites to track users’ locations. This scheme is called geo-encryption, and basically the idea is that the sending computer will specify a location in the world, let’s say the coffee shop next block, and will send a message there. You as a receiver will need to go to the coffee shop and read your GPS coordinates to “decrypt” the message. If you have some body outside the coffee shop who wants to spoof the message, he can’t decipher it to understand it because he is not physically in the coffee shop!!   Pretty cool ha? This idea has many applications, such as the military who want to coordinate their communication which a central physically known base.  It can also be used for cinema distribution in Hollywood, where they restrict video data to physical sites of cinema distributors, thus making copy-right global. The inventor of this.

method is a lady from Michigan, named Dorothy Denning, who started her career as a math teacher. In her spare time, she learned to figure out new ways to provide computer security.  In the 1970s, she led a project to help federal agencies like the CIA, IRS and FBI share sensitive data. A decade later, she devised a system that detects hackers the moment they crack into a system, enabling the U.S. Navy and other agencies to better guard classified data. Now after 30 years of research, her new scheme has drawn interest from the Pentagon. Coded messages that the Defense Department sends its commanders in the field, for example, could be deciphered only in a certain room of a certain building. The idea is now patented to Dorothy and we just have to wait to see how this technology involves in the future.