Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2019 Aug 14;21(8):e13600. doi: 10.2196/13600

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

©Michael Jones, Matthew Johnson, Mark Shervey, Joel T Dudley, Noah Zimmerman. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 14.08.2019.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

PMC Copyright notice

Hiding global positioning system (GPS) coordinates behind a simplistic zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) implementation. Practically, this looks like a simplistic black box whereby the ZKP is a subroutine that performs feature extraction without revealing the raw GPS coordinate to the researcher. For example, this subroutine could consist of implementing a lookup table that maps GPS coordinates to category of location. The challenge then lies in careful implementation and permeability of this subroutine to ensure security of the data (highlighted in gray). A malicious party should not be able to identify a participant’s GPS coordinates through a process of elimination by trying several inputs. The analogue would be trying to guess a password via brute force.