VIC-PRO: Vicinity Protection by Concealing Location Coordinates Using Geometrical Transformations in Location Based Services

Abstract

Portable devices today are striding computation potential and memory at par and sometimes even significantly higher than those found in desktop machines. Today’s lifestyle is more mobile than earlier, offices are open cafe houses and people prefer to work from plug and play office spaces. With the exponential growth of mobile technology and its users, a more astute system is in place called ‘location based services’ (LBSs). Since client uses these services out of their dynamic or static working behavior and is required to submit the real location (with query) to get the absolute benefits, it is crucial to layout the systems and frameworks which can protect users from the security and privacy threats by keeping the location information private. Existing defense mechanisms based on trusted third party possesses the significant vulnerability to vicinity identification, which in turn end up identifying the real world identity of the query issuer. In this paper, we present a scheme to preserve location privacy, called VIC-PRO, that fortifies the location privacy of the client alongside vicinity protection using geometrical transformations. We experimentally compare the scheme with other existing mechanisms to demonstrate that VIC-PRO is more efficient, safe against vicinity identification attack, and guarantees better user privacy in an LBS setup.