Smart-Area-Selection Based Location Privacy Enhancement

Protecting location privacy from location-based service (LBS) providers is a challenging problem. Existing mechanisms either use a trusted third party (TTP) or location perturbation techniques. In TTP-based mechanisms, when the security of a TTP is compromised, the user’s privacy is breached. On the other hand, in location perturbation-based mechanisms, privacy is achieved at the expense of query accuracy. To overcome these problems, in this article, a novel smart-area-selection (SAS)-based location privacy protection algorithm is proposed. The proposed approach does not require the user to trust any party including LBS. The proposed efficient mechanism achieves privacy without compromising the accuracy of the query. Furthermore, our SAS-based mechanism uses a user-specific geographical coordinate system and public key encryption for additional security. In the existing location privacy protection mechanisms, when LBSs are accessed continuously, more location information can be extracted by a smart adversary. A specially designed query region spreading algorithm is used in the proposed mechanism to overcome this problem. The validity of the proposed SAS-based location privacy protection mechanism is demonstrated by simulation results.