Blockchain-Enabled Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing Scheme for LBSNs

Liang Zhu,Jianwei Zhang,Xiaowei Liu,Zengyu Cai,Liping Yu,Xiaohong Jiang

doi:10.1155/2021/9997887

Liang Zhu, Jianwei Zhang + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/9997887

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Abstract

The rise of Internet of Things (IoT) technology promotes the rapid development of location services industry. The idea of smart connectivity also provides a new direction for Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs). However, due to limited calculate ability and internal storage space of IoT devices, historical location data of users is generally stored in the central server, which is likely to cause the disclosure of users’ private data. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-enabled Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing (B-PPLS) scheme, which is a new framework that not only protects user location privacy but also provides effective location sharing services for users. For B-PPLS, location data owners can share the location area instead of location coordinates to Requesters, in order to realize the location privacy preserving. Also, the Merkle hash tree is utilized to divide the location area, so as to realize the multilevel privacy preserving. Furthermore, four algorithms are proposed to achieve the four stages of initialization, location record, location sharing, and location verification, respectively. Finally, we analyze the security of the proposed B-PPLS scheme and compare the performance with other related location privacy-preserving schemes by experimental evaluation.

Highlights

Introduction e characteristic of LocationBased Social Networks (i.e., Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs)) is that people can make use of “check-in” to achieve the sharing and propagation of location-based services in the virtual world [1]
We focus on Blockchain-enabled PrivacyPreserving Location Sharing (B-PPLS), which is a new framework that protects user location privacy and provides effective location sharing services for users
(2) We present four algorithms to complete the processes of initialization, location record, location sharing, and location verification

Summary

Introduction

Based Social Networks (i.e., LBSNs) is that people can make use of “check-in” to achieve the sharing and propagation of location-based services in the virtual world [1]. Large numbers of applications are developed, such as route navigation, friend discovery, and POI recommendation. It usually requires the real-time location data sharing between devices for IoT technology and LBSNs, which could potentially lead to serious breaches of users’ privacy. E user-user graph represents the relationship among users, which is built by utilizing Blockchain technology. E location-location graph represents the relationship among geographical locations according to semantical information

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Conclusion