Location Anonymity Based on Fake Queries in Continuous Location-Based Services

Abstract

The large-scale deployment of location-based services (LBSs) brings about the potential abuse of their clients' personal information. Therefore, location privacy in LBSs is significant. Ensuring location privacy for mobile users is an effort to prevent semi-honest or dishonest service providers from abusing the location information. Though there exist several techniques to preserve location privacy of mobile users, these techniques cannot effectively protect the location privacy in continuous location-based services. In this paper, we propose a location anonymity scheme based on the fake queries in continuous location-based services. To prevent attackers from tracing a mobile user by his continuous queries, some fake continuous queries will be injected by some neighbors. These fake queries can produce equivalent fake paths similar to the user's mobile path, because they are generated according to the user's speed and mobile direction. It is so difficult for the attackers to distinguish the real continuous queries from other fake queries. Security analysis shows that our scheme can resist the continuous queries attack, maximum speed attack and abnormal points attack. Experimental results manifest that our scheme can provide stringent privacy guarantees and is beyond the limitation of existing algorithms based on K-anonymity technique.