Abstract
The popularity of the modern smart devices and mobile social networks (MSNs) brings mobile users better experiences and services by taking advantage of location-aware capabilities. Location sharing, as an important function of MSNs, has attracted attention with growing popularity. While the users get great benefits and conveniences from MSNs, they also have high concerns about the privacy of location. However, in the existing solution, the privacy of users can hardly be guaranteed without the assumption of full trust in the service provider (SP), and few previous research studies have discussed the individual requirement of mobile users in MSNs. In this paper, we propose a user-defined location-sharing scheme (ULSS) to achieve enhanced privacy preservation under different contexts. We present a coarse-grained proximity detection method and a lightweight order-preserving encryption- (OPE-) based method to provide the users with flexible privacy preservation at different privacy levels. The proposed scheme preserves user’s location privacy with respect to SP, friends, and other adversaries, getting rid of the introduction of fully trusted party (TTP). Extensive experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme.
Highlights
With the development of the smartphone and wireless communications technology, mobile social networks (MSNs) have seen a tremendous rise and are becoming a kind of important tool for our daily communication
During the phase of coarse-grained proximity detection, we focus on the location transformation using the Hilbert curve method, which is mainly affected by the parameter of Hilbert order N
During the phase of user-defined nearby friend detection, we focus on the location encryption by Order-preserving encryption (OPE), which is mainly affected by the size of data
Summary
With the development of the smartphone and wireless communications technology, mobile social networks (MSNs) have seen a tremendous rise and are becoming a kind of important tool for our daily communication. MSNs such as Foursquare, Wechat, and Google Latitude bridge the users’ physical and social worlds taking advantage of location-aware capabilities by mobile devices. While the users reap great benefit and convenience from MSNs, they have high concerns about the privacy of location, since the users have to submit their exact location information to their friends or to the service provider (SP) when they enjoy the service. In MSNs, the user’s location information is associated with the social network ID and the social relationships of users, which makes the user privacy preservation more significant and more complicated [4,5,6,7]. In MSNs, the user’s location information is associated with the social network ID and the social relationships of users, which makes the user privacy preservation more significant and more complicated [4,5,6,7]. erefore, there are both the development chance and challenge in MSNs, and the key is how to protect the privacy of users when providing highquality services
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
