VERDICT: Privacy-preserving authentication of range queries in location-based services

Abstract

We demonstrate VERDICT, a location-based range query service featuring the privacy-preserving authentication capability. VERDICT adopts the common data-as-a-service (DaaS) model, which consists of the data owner (a location registry or a mobile operator) who provides the querying data, the service provider who executes the query, and the querying users. The system features a privacy-preserving query authentication module that enables the user to verify the correctness of results while still protecting the data privacy. This feature is crucial in many location-based services where the querying data are user locations. To achieve this, VERDICT employs an MR-tree based privacy-preserving authentication scheme proposed in our earlier work [3]. The use case study shows that VERDICT provides efficient and smooth user experience for authenticating location-based range queries.