A Novel Location Privacy-Preserving Approach Based on Blockchain.

Ying Qiu,Jiahui Chen,Yi Liu,Xuan Li

doi:10.3390/s20123519

Ying Qiu, Jiahui Chen + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s20123519

Copy DOI

Abstract

Location-based services (LBS) bring convenience to people’s lives but are also accompanied with privacy leakages. To protect the privacy of LBS users, many location privacy protection algorithms were proposed. However, these algorithms often have difficulty to maintain a balance between service quality and user privacy. In this paper, we first overview the shortcomings of the existing two privacy protection architectures and privacy protection technologies, then we propose a location privacy protection method based on blockchain. Our method satisfies the principle of k-anonymity privacy protection and does not need the help of trusted third-party anonymizing servers. The combination of multiple private blockchains can disperse the user’s transaction records, which can provide users with stronger location privacy protection and will not reduce the quality of service. We also propose a reward mechanism to encourage user participation. Finally, we implement our approach in the Remix blockchain to show the efficiency, which further indicates the potential application prospect for the distributed network environment.

Highlights

With the rapid development of communication technology, location-based services (LBS) are being widely used in various fields [1,2,3]—for example, health care, mobile social
The continuous query means that the location service provider (LSP) provides location services according to the continuous changes of the user’s location, such as “query the gas stations closest to me while driving.”
Create private blockchain: When users to obtain location services as a requester, they can create blockchain: their own private the user releases the task the blockchain users wantThen to obtain location services as to a requester, they to initiate a transaction or become an agent to undertake the task released by other requesters can create their own private blockchain

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid development of communication technology, location-based services (LBS) are being widely used in various fields [1,2,3]—for example, health care, mobile social. LBS [4,5] is based on the location information, with the support of geographic information systems (GIS) and lightweight mobile devices, to provide users with value-added services including points of interest query. The snapshot query refers to the user actively input query conditions to query, such as “query the gas stations closest to me now.”. The continuous query means that the location service provider (LSP) provides location services according to the continuous changes of the user’s location, such as “query the gas stations closest to me while driving.”. Typical applications include map applications (such as Google Maps), interest point query (such as Meituan), location-aware services (such as Foursquare), etc. When users want to “query which Meituan takeaways are near me,”

Objectives

Results

Conclusion