Shortest Path Computation with No Information Leakage

Shortest path computation is one of the most common queries in location-based services (LBSs). Although particularly useful, such queries raise serious privacy concerns. Exposing to a (potentially untrusted) LBS the client's position and her destination may reveal personal information, such as social habits, health condition, shopping preferences, lifestyle choices, etc. The only existing method for privacy-preserving shortest path computation follows the obfuscation paradigm; it prevents the LBS from inferring the source and destination of the query with a probability higher than a threshold. This implies, however, that the LBS still deduces some information (albeit not exact) about the client's location and her destination. In this paper we aim at strong privacy, where the adversary learns nothing about the shortest path query. We achieve this via established private information retrieval techniques, which we treat as black-box building blocks. Experiments on real, large-scale road networks assess the practicality of our schemes.Comment: VLDB201

Privacy-Preserving Shortest Path Computation

Navigation is one of the most popular cloud computing services. But in virtually all cloud-based navigation systems, the client must reveal her location and destination to the cloud service provider in order to learn the fastest route. In this work, we present a cryptographic protocol for navigation on city streets that provides privacy for both the client's location and the service provider's routing data. Our key ingredient is a novel method for compressing the next-hop routing matrices in networks such as city street maps. Applying our compression method to the map of Los Angeles, for example, we achieve over tenfold reduction in the representation size. In conjunction with other cryptographic techniques, this compressed representation results in an efficient protocol suitable for fully-private real-time navigation on city streets. We demonstrate the practicality of our protocol by benchmarking it on real street map data for major cities such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C.Comment: Extended version of NDSS 2016 pape

Asymmetric structurepreserving subgraph query for large graphs

Abstract-One fundamental type of query for graph databases is subgraph isomorphism queries (a.k.a subgraph queries). Due to the computational hardness of subgraph queries coupled with the cost of managing massive graph data, outsourcing the query computation to a third-party service provider has been an economical and scalable approach. However, confidentiality is known to be an important attribute of Quality of Service (QoS) in Query as a Service (QaaS). In this paper, we propose the first practical private approach for subgraph query services, asymmetric structure-preserving subgraph query processing, where the data graph is publicly known and the query structure/topology is kept secret. Unlike other previous methods for subgraph queries, this paper proposes a series of novel optimizations that only exploit graph structures, not the queries. Further, we propose a robust query encoding and adopt the novel cyclic group based encryption so that query processing is transformed into a series of private matrix operations. Our experiments confirm that our techniques are efficient and the optimizations are effective