Privacy Protection In Location-based Services Research Articles

An Efficient Differential Privacy-Based Method for Location Privacy Protection in Location-Based Services.

Location-based services (LBS) are widely used due to the rapid development of mobile devices and location technology. Users usually provide precise location information to LBS to access the corresponding services. However, this convenience comes with the risk of location privacy disclosure, which can infringe upon personal privacy and security. In this paper, a location privacy protection method based on differential privacy is proposed, which efficiently protects users' locations, without degrading the performance of LBS. First, a location-clustering (L-clustering) algorithm is proposed to divide the continuous locations into different clusters based on the distance and density relationships among multiple groups. Then, a differential privacy-based location privacy protection algorithm (DPLPA) is proposed to protect users' location privacy, where Laplace noise is added to the resident points and centroids within the cluster. The experimental results show that the DPLPA achieves a high level of data utility, with minimal time consumption, while effectively protecting the privacy of location information.

Personalized Location Privacy Protection for Location-Based Services in Vehicular Networks

Location-based services (LBSs) are widely used in vehicular networks. Privacy leakage from LBS is a key issue to be solved. However, the existing schemes fail to provide differentiated protection for users’ different locations, which may lead to the leakage of location information. In this paper, we propose a personalized location privacy protection scheme based on differential privacy to protect the privacy of location-based services in vehicular networks. Firstly, we propose a normalized decision matrix to describe the efficiency and the privacy effect of navigation recommendations. We then establish a utility model integrated with users’ privacy preferences to compute the effective driving route. Secondly, for different service request locations in the driving route, we define sensitivity distance as an index to quantify their privacy requirements. The privacy budget will be added to the service request location to generate a false location. Moreover, due to the limitation of road range in the driving route, if the privacy budget value allocated is small enough, the false location generated by the Plane Laplace will be deviated. As a result, the attacker can deduce users’ real request locations. Consequently, considering the factors of trajectory leakage, attack strategy and QoS, we establish a multi-objective optimization model to optimize the false location. Based on the real data set, we conduct a series of comparison simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can satisfy users’ personalized services needs and provide an optimal solution to privacy and QoS.

Constructing dummy query sequences to protect location privacy and query privacy in location-based services

Location-based services (LBS) have become an important part of people’s daily life. However, while providing great convenience for mobile users, LBS result in a serious problem on personal privacy, i.e., location privacy and query privacy. However, existing privacy methods for LBS generally take into consideration only location privacy or query privacy, without considering the problem of protecting both of them simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to construct a group of dummy query sequences, to cover up the query locations and query attributes of mobile users and thus protect users’ privacy in LBS. First, we present a client-based framework for user privacy protection in LBS, which requires not only no change to the existing LBS algorithm on the server-side, but also no compromise to the accuracy of a LBS query. Second, based on the framework, we introduce a privacy model to formulate the constraints that ideal dummy query sequences should satisfy: (1) the similarity of feature distribution, which measures the effectiveness of the dummy query sequences to hide a true user query sequence; and (2) the exposure degree of user privacy, which measures the effectiveness of the dummy query sequences to cover up the location privacy and query privacy of a mobile user. Finally, we present an implementation algorithm to well meet the privacy model. Besides, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which show that the location privacy and attribute privacy behind LBS queries can be effectively protected by the dummy queries generated by our approach.

Personalized Location Privacy Protection for Location-Based Services in Vehicular Networks

With the development of vehicular network, location-based services (LBSs) provide increasing diversified services for drivers and passengers. When users enjoy the services, users' location needs to be constantly updated to service providers, which causes the location information to be speculated and attacked by attackers. However, existing schemes don't provide differentiated protection for users' different locations, which may lead to the leakage of location information. Therefore, we propose a location privacy protection method to satisfy users' personalized privacy needs with reasonable protection of their privacy. Firstly, we define a normalized decision matrix to describe the efficiency and privacy effects of a route, and establish a multi-attribute utility function to quantify the utility of different routes for route selection. Then, according to users' personalized privacy protection need, we allocate the privacy budget for each query location on the selected route based on the distance between it and his nearest sensitive location. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to existing methods, our scheme can meet the user's service requirements and achieve better service quality under the conditions of reasonable protection of their privacy.

Resilient Privacy Protection for Location-Based Services through Decentralization

Location-Based Services (LBSs) provide valuable services, with convenient features for mobile users. However, the location and other information disclosed through each query to the LBS erodes user privacy. This is a concern especially because LBS providers can be honest-but-curious , collecting queries and tracking users’ whereabouts and infer sensitive user data. This motivated both centralized and decentralized location privacy protection schemes for LBSs: anonymizing and obfuscating LBS queries to not disclose exact information, while still getting useful responses. Decentralized schemes overcome disadvantages of centralized schemes, eliminating anonymizers, and enhancing users’ control over sensitive information. However, an insecure decentralized system could create serious risks beyond private information leakage. More so, attacking an improperly designed decentralized LBS privacy protection scheme could be an effective and low-cost step to breach user privacy. We address exactly this problem, by proposing security enhancements for mobile data sharing systems. We protect user privacy while preserving accountability of user activities, leveraging pseudonymous authentication with mainstream cryptography. We show our scheme can be deployed with off-the-shelf devices based on an experimental evaluation of an implementation in a static automotive testbed.

A Survey of System Architectures, Privacy Preservation, and Main Research Challenges on Location-Based Services

Location-based services (LBSs) have become popular in recent years due to the ever-increasing usage of smart mobile devices and mobile applications through networks. Although LBS application provides great benefits to mobile users, it also raises a sever privacy concern of users due to the untrusted service providers. In the lack of privacy enhancing mechanisms, most applications of the LBS may discourage the user’s acceptance of location services in general, and endanger the user’s privacy in particular. Therefore, it is a great interest to discuss on the recent privacy-preserving mechanisms in LBSs. Many existing location-privacy protection-mechanisms (LPPMs) make great efforts to increase the attacker’s uncertainty on the user’s actual whereabouts by generating a multiple of fake-locations together with user’s actual positions. In this survey, we present a study and analysis of existing LPPMs and the state-of-art privacy measures in service quality aware LBS applications. We first study the general architecture of privacy qualification system for LBSs by surveying the existing framework and outlining its main feature components. We then give an overview of the basic privacy requirements to be considered in the design and evaluation of LPPMs. Furthermore, we discuss the classification and countermeasure solutions of existing LPPMs for mitigating the current LBS privacy protection challenges. These classifications include anonymization, obfuscation, and an encryption-based technique, as well as the combination of them is called a hybrid mechanism. Finally, we discuss several open issues and research challenges based on the latest progresses for on-going LBS and location privacy research.

Ensuring Privacy Protection in Location-based Services through Integration of Cache and Dummies

Location-Based Services (LBS) have recently gained much attention from the research community due to the openness of wireless networks and the daily development of mobile devices. However, using LBS is not risk free. Location privacy protection is a major issue that concerns users. Since users utilize their real location to get the benefits of the LBS, this gives an attacker the chance to track their real location and collect sensitive and personal information about the user. If the attacker is the LBS server itself, privacy issues may reach dangerous levels because all information related to the user's activities are stored and accessible on the LBS server. In this paper, we propose a novel location privacy protection method called the Safe Cycle-Based Approach (SCBA). Specifically, the SCBA ensures location privacy by generating strong dummy locations that are far away from each other and belong to different sub-areas at the same time. This ensures robustness against advanced inference attacks such as location homogeneity attacks and semantic location attacks. To achieve location privacy protection, as well as high performance, we integrate the SCBA approach with a cache. The key performance enhancement is storing the responses of historical queries to answer future ones using a bloom filter-based search technique. Compared to well-known approaches, namely the ReDS, RaDS, and HMC approaches, experimental results showed that the proposed SCBA approach produces better outputs in terms of privacy protection level, robustness against inference attacks, communication cost, cache hit ratio, and response time.

Method of trajectory privacy protection based on restraining trajectory in LBS

With the development of mobile positioning technology, location-based services are becoming more and more widely used in life, but it has produced the security problem of the user's privacy leakage. In this paper, the problem of user trajectory privacy protection in location-based services is introduced, and a method of trajectory privacy protection based on restraining trajectory in LBS is proposed. The proposed method is done by restraining the release of sensitive position and choosing a non-sensitive position that the user might stay at with the maximum probability to replace the sensitive position. So it will prevent the leakage of sensitive position of user's trajectory, and protect the user's activity trajectory, and give the method of calculating the privacy protection degree of restraining method.

Privacy protection in locationbased services: Model and development

In recent years,with the rapid increase in the number of GPS-enabled mobile devices,location-based services(LBS)applications grow explosively,such as finding the nearest gas station or restaurants within one kilometer and so on.Users benefit from convenience of LBS.However,many privacy issues draw people's attention gradually.Acomprehensive understanding of existing privacy protection work in the location-based services is important for researchers to grasp the present research status,the future development directionsand the challenges.We give a deep survey of the recent improvement in LBS,which mainly focus on existing attacking models,privacy protection model,measure model and datasets.What′s more,we classifies the existing attacking model and privacy protection model and made comparisons based on different features.Finally unsolved problems and future development are also discussed.

Long-term location privacy protection for location-based services in mobile cloud computing

The popularity of mobile devices, especially intelligent mobile phones, significantly prompt various location-based services (LBSs) in cloud systems. These services not only greatly facilitate people's daily lives, but also cause serious threats that users' location information may be misused or leaked by service providers. The dummy-based privacy protection techniques have significant advantages over others because they neither rely on trusted servers nor need adequate number of trustworthy peers. Existing dummy-based location privacy protection schemes, however, cannot yet provide long-term privacy protection. In this paper, we propose four principles for the dummy-based long-term location privacy protection (LT-LPP). Based on the principles, we propose a set of long-term consistent dummy generation algorithms for the LT-LPP. Our approach is built on soft computing techniques and can balance the preferred privacy protection and computing cost. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach is effective to both long-term privacy protection and fake path generation for LBSs in mobile clouds.

A Framework for Measuring Query Privacy in Location-based Service

The widespread use of location-based services (LBSs), which allows untrusted service provider to collect large number of user request records, leads to serious privacy concerns. In response to these issues, a number of LBS privacy protection mechanisms (LPPMs) have been recently proposed. However, the evaluation of these LPPMs usually disregards the background knowledge that the adversary may possess about users’ contextual information, which runs the risk of wrongly evaluating users’ query privacy. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a generic formal quantification framework,which comprehensively contemplate the various elements that influence the query privacy of users and explicitly states the knowledge that an adversary might have in the context of query privacy. Moreover, a way to model the adversary’s attack on query privacy is proposed, which allows us to show the insufficiency of the existing query privacy metrics, e.g., k-anonymity. Thus we propose two new metrics: entropy anonymity and mutual information anonymity. Lastly, we run a set of experiments on datasets generated by network based generator of moving objects proposed by Thomas Brinkhoff. The results show the effectiveness and efficient of our framework to measure the LPPM.

Privacy quantification model based on the Bayes conditional risk in Location-Based Services

The widespread use of Location-Based Services (LBSs), which allows untrusted service providers to collect large quantities of information regarding users' locations, has raised serious privacy concerns. In response to these issues, a variety of LBS Privacy Protection Mechanisms (LPPMs) have been recently proposed. However, evaluating these LPPMs remains problematic because of the absence of a generic adversarial model for most existing privacy metrics. In particular, the relationships between these metrics have not been examined in depth under a common adversarial model, leading to a possible selection of the inappropriate metric, which runs the risk of wrongly evaluating LPPMs. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a privacy quantification model, which is based on Bayes conditional privacy, to specify a general adversarial model. This model employs a general definition of conditional privacy regarding the adversary's estimation error to compare the different LBS privacy metrics. Moreover, we present a theoretical analysis for specifying how to connect our metric with other popular LBS privacy metrics. We show that our privacy quantification model permits interpretation and comparison of various popular LBS privacy metrics under a common perspective. Our results contribute to a better understanding of how privacy properties can be measured, as well as to the better selection of the most appropriate metric for any given LBS application.

위치 기반 서비스에서 도로 네트워크의 거리 정보를 이용한 사용자 정보 은닉 기법

Recent development in wireless communication technology like GPS as well as mobile equipments like PDA and cellular phone makes location-based services (LBSs) popular. However, because users request a query to LBS servers by using their exact locations while moving on the road network, users' privacy may not be protected in the LBSs. Therefore, a mechanism for users' privacy protection is required for the safe and comfortable use of LBSs by mobile users. For this, we, in this paper, propose a road network distance based cloaking scheme supporting user privacy protection in location-based services. The proposed scheme creates a cloaking area by considering road network distance, in order to support the efficient and safe LBSs on the road network. Finally, we show from our performance analysis that our cloaking scheme outperforms the existing cloaking scheme in terms of cloaking area and service time.

K-Nearest neighbor query processing algorithm for cloaking regions towards user privacy protection in location-based services

Due to the advancement of wireless internet and mobile positioning technology, the application of location-based services (LBSs) has become popular for mobile users. Since users have to send their exact locations to obtain the service, it may lead to several privacy threats. To solve this problem, a cloaking method has been proposed to blur users' exact locations into a cloaked spatial region with a required privacy threshold (k). With the cloaked region, an LBS server can carry out a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search algorithm. Some recent studies have proposed methods to search k-nearest POIs while protecting a user's privacy. However, they have at least one major problem, such as inefficiency on query processing or low precision of retrieved result. To resolve these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel k-NN query processing algorithm for a cloaking region to satisfy both requirements of fast query processing time and high precision of the retrieved result. To achieve fast query processing time, we propose a new pruning technique based on a 2D-coodinate scheme. In addition, we make use of a Voronoi diagram for retrieving the nearest POIs efficiently. To satisfy the requirement of high precision of the retrieved result, we guarantee that our k-NN query processing algorithm always contains the exact set of k nearest neighbors. Our performance analysis shows that our algorithm achieves better performance in terms of query processing time and the number of candidate POIs compared with other algorithms.

A context-aware scheme for privacy-preserving location-based services

We address issues related to privacy protection in location-based services (LBSs). Most existing privacy-preserving LBS techniques either require a trusted third-party (anonymizer) or use cryptographic protocols that are computationally and communicationally expensive. Our design of privacy-preserving techniques is principled on not requiring a trusted third-party while being highly efficient in terms of time and space complexities. The problem has two interesting and challenging characteristics: First, the degree of privacy protection and LBS accuracy depends on the context, such as population and road density, around a user’s location. Second, an adversary may violate a user’s location privacy in two ways: (i) based on the user’s location information contained in the LBS query payload and (ii) by inferring a user’s geographical location based on the device’s IP address. To address these challenges, we introduce CAP, a context-aware privacy-preserving LBS system with integrated protection for both data privacy and communication anonymity. We have implemented CAP and integrated it with Google Maps, a popular LBS system. Theoretical analysis and experimental results validate CAP’s effectiveness on privacy protection, LBS accuracy, and communication QoS (Quality-of-Service).

Protecting location privacy in mobile geoservices using fuzzy inference systems

Mobile geoservices, especially location-based services (LBSs), are becoming more popular each day. The most important goal of these services is to use a user’s location to provide location-aware services. Because the user’s spatial information can be abused by organizations or advertisers, and sometimes for criminal purposes, the protection of this information is a necessary part of such services. There has been substantial research on privacy protection in LBSs and mobile geoservices; most studies have attempted to anonymize the user and hide his/her identity or to engage the user in the protection process. The major defects of these previous approaches include an increased complexity of system architecture, a decrease in service capabilities, undesirable processing times, and a failure to satisfy users. Additionally, anonymization is not a suitable solution for context-aware services. Therefore, in this paper, a new approach is proposed to locate users with different levels of spatial precision, based on his/her spatio-temporal context and a user’s group, through fuzzy inference systems. The user’s location and the time of the request determine the spatio-temporal context of the user. A fuzzy rule base is formed separately for each group of users and services. An interview is a simple method to extract the rules. The spatial precision of a user’s location, which is obtained from a fuzzy system, goes to a spatial function called the conceptualization function, to determine the user’s location based on one of the following five levels of qualitative precision: geometrical coordinates, streets, parish, region, and qualitative location, such as the eastern part of the city. Thus, there is no need to anonymize users in mobile geoservices or to turn the service off. The applicability and efficiency of the proposed method are shown for a group of taxi drivers.

“Don’t trust anyone”: Privacy protection for location-based services

We present a decentralized approach that exploits the capability of mobile devices to form wireless personal ad-hoc networks in order to protect the privacy of users who access location-based services. The novelty of our approach is that users do not need to trust any party such as an intermediary server or peers with their locations and identities. We propose efficient algorithms for users to compute a k -anonymous imprecise location and to randomly select one of her peers with uniform probability who forwards the service request on behalf of the user. Our experimental evaluation shows that using our approach a user can enjoy a high quality of service with a high degree of privacy.

Scanning the literature

Includes: Sora: High Performance Software Radio Using General Purpose Multi-core Processors; Block-Switched Networks: A New Paradigm for Wireless Transport; A Fundamental Scalability Criterion for Data Aggregation in VANETs; Feeling-Based Location Privacy Protection for Location-Based Services; Hiding Stars with Fireworks: Location Privacy through Camouflage