893 research outputs found
Preventing Location-Based Identity Inference in Anonymous Spatial Queries
The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (for example, GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of Location-Based Services. For such applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are essential. Existing privacy-enhancing techniques rely on encryption to safeguard communication channels, and on pseudonyms to protect user identities. Nevertheless, the query contents may disclose the physical location of the user. In this paper, we present a framework for preventing location-based identity inference of users who issue spatial queries to Location-Based Services. We propose transformations based on the well-established K-anonymity concept to compute exact answers for range and nearest neighbor search, without revealing the query source. Our methods optimize the entire process of anonymizing the requests and processing the transformed spatial queries. Extensive experimental studies suggest that the proposed techniques are applicable to real-life scenarios with numerous mobile users
Search Me If You Can: Privacy-preserving Location Query Service
Location-Based Service (LBS) becomes increasingly popular with the dramatic
growth of smartphones and social network services (SNS), and its context-rich
functionalities attract considerable users. Many LBS providers use users'
location information to offer them convenience and useful functions. However,
the LBS could greatly breach personal privacy because location itself contains
much information. Hence, preserving location privacy while achieving utility
from it is still an challenging question now. This paper tackles this
non-trivial challenge by designing a suite of novel fine-grained
Privacy-preserving Location Query Protocol (PLQP). Our protocol allows
different levels of location query on encrypted location information for
different users, and it is efficient enough to be applied in mobile platforms.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, IEEE INFOCOM 201
Location Privacy in Spatial Crowdsourcing
Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) is a new platform that engages individuals in
collecting and analyzing environmental, social and other spatiotemporal
information. With SC, requesters outsource their spatiotemporal tasks to a set
of workers, who will perform the tasks by physically traveling to the tasks'
locations. This chapter identifies privacy threats toward both workers and
requesters during the two main phases of spatial crowdsourcing, tasking and
reporting. Tasking is the process of identifying which tasks should be assigned
to which workers. This process is handled by a spatial crowdsourcing server
(SC-server). The latter phase is reporting, in which workers travel to the
tasks' locations, complete the tasks and upload their reports to the SC-server.
The challenge is to enable effective and efficient tasking as well as reporting
in SC without disclosing the actual locations of workers (at least until they
agree to perform a task) and the tasks themselves (at least to workers who are
not assigned to those tasks). This chapter aims to provide an overview of the
state-of-the-art in protecting users' location privacy in spatial
crowdsourcing. We provide a comparative study of a diverse set of solutions in
terms of task publishing modes (push vs. pull), problem focuses (tasking and
reporting), threats (server, requester and worker), and underlying technical
approaches (from pseudonymity, cloaking, and perturbation to exchange-based and
encryption-based techniques). The strengths and drawbacks of the techniques are
highlighted, leading to a discussion of open problems and future work
Building Confidential and Efficient Query Services in the Cloud with RASP Data Perturbation
With the wide deployment of public cloud computing infrastructures, using
clouds to host data query services has become an appealing solution for the
advantages on scalability and cost-saving. However, some data might be
sensitive that the data owner does not want to move to the cloud unless the
data confidentiality and query privacy are guaranteed. On the other hand, a
secured query service should still provide efficient query processing and
significantly reduce the in-house workload to fully realize the benefits of
cloud computing. We propose the RASP data perturbation method to provide secure
and efficient range query and kNN query services for protected data in the
cloud. The RASP data perturbation method combines order preserving encryption,
dimensionality expansion, random noise injection, and random projection, to
provide strong resilience to attacks on the perturbed data and queries. It also
preserves multidimensional ranges, which allows existing indexing techniques to
be applied to speedup range query processing. The kNN-R algorithm is designed
to work with the RASP range query algorithm to process the kNN queries. We have
carefully analyzed the attacks on data and queries under a precisely defined
threat model and realistic security assumptions. Extensive experiments have
been conducted to show the advantages of this approach on efficiency and
security.Comment: 18 pages, to appear in IEEE TKDE, accepted in December 201
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