Efficiently Enforcing the Security and Privacy Policies in a Mobile Environment

Abstract

Effective delivery of location-based services (LBS) requires efficient processing of access requests to find the past, present and future location of the mobile customers (or moving objects) that match a certain profile. However, this gives rise to a number of security and privacy concerns because LBS may need to locate and track a mobile customer, and gain access to his/her profile. Location information has the potential to allow an adversary to physically locate a person, and user profile information may include sensitive attributes such as name, address, linguistic preference, age group, income level, marital status, education level, etc. As such, mobile customers have legitimate concerns about their personal safety, if such information should fall into the wrong hands. One way to take these concerns into account is by establishing security policies and enforcing them for every access. A comprehensive security policy can encode spatiotemporal restrictions on access to location and profile. To incorporate security, an appropriate access control mechanism must be in place to enforce the authorization specifications reflecting the above security and privacy policies. Serving an access request requires to search for the desired moving objects that satisfy the query, as well as identify and enforce the relevant security policies.