SoK: Offline Finding Protocols for Lightweight Location Tracking#

Authors: Akshaya Kumar (Georgia Institute of Technology), Carolina Ortega Pérez (Cornell University), Joseph Jaeger (Georgia Institute of Technology), Thomas Ristenpart (Univeristy of Toronto), Michael Specter (Georgia Institute of Technology)

• Why: The Find My-style crowdsourced location ecosystem (Apple, Google, Samsung, third-party tags) is a large, deployed, cryptographically interesting protocol family with live standardization pressure (unwanted-tracking mitigation). A SoK from the GT/Cornell/Toronto systems-security corridor is the map of that ecosystem.
• What: A systematization of offline-finding protocols — how lightweight devices with no connectivity broadcast cryptographically protected beacons that nearby crowd devices relay to the owner (title/author line only — no abstract in program).
• How: Expect a taxonomy of beacon privacy mechanisms (rotating public keys, address rotation), relay and discovery architectures, and attacker models including stalking/unwanted tracking.
• Where applicable: Device-finding networks and BLE-based crowd location infrastructure; increasingly relevant as anti-stalking features become a cross-vendor interoperability problem.