NJIT Computing Dean, Craig Gotsman, Awarded Patent for Location Privacy
Anyone who downloaded a contact tracing app for the COVID pandemic may have had concerns about privacy risks of location tracking, but such concerns are now addressed in a unique way through a patent recently awarded to Craig Gotsman, dean of NJIT's Ying Wu College of Computing.
Location data could easily fall into the wrong hands, making people nervous about using certain kinds of applications such as COVID tracing. To help, Gotsman and longtime collaborator Kai Hormann of Universita della Svizerra Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, invented a method to easily hide the location data in a codeword that uniquely describes the location, yet cannot be inverted to reveal it without investing an unpractical amount of computing resources.
Hiding sensitive data is known as obfuscation in the cybersecurity field. The new method lets application developers determine geographic proximity without knowing precise details. That means contact tracing is still possible while protecting user privacy. Unlike other methods, the new invention works without requiring encryption keys. The patent also describes protocols for a trusted central server to store the coded location data and manage the entire contact tracing process.
While relatively easy to describe, the patent makes use of a clever combination of probabilistic techniques and classical data hiding methods based on number theory. A detailed description of the method is posted in the inventors arXiv publication.
Gotsman, who is also a Distinguished Professor in the computer science department, is an active researcher in computer graphics and computational geometry, the latter which led him to explore ways to hide geometric location data during the early days of the pandemic. With eleven U.S. patents already under his belt, earning him the distinction of Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2019, he is no stranger to the world of academic-industrial tech transfer. A number of Gotsman’s academic inventions have been patented and commercialized in the past, the most recent resulting in a startup company developing video processing software, acquired by Apple in 2017.
"Academic research is a long-term affair and requires patience and persistence. While some inventions can be applied immediately, it sometimes takes ten or more years before the importance is realized and used in a practical implementation. Although we developed this method for location hiding, it can be used for hiding other types of data such as medical information as well," he said. "So I’m confident it will prove useful before the next pandemic hits and we have to go back to contact tracing.”
