Walking along the road with anonymous users in similar attributes

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Information Security
• Mobile Computing

Background:

• Location-based services (LBS) are increasingly prevalent due to smartphone adoption.
• Continuous queries in LBS pose significant location privacy risks by inadvertently revealing user attributes.
• Central servers (CS) used for privacy preservation are often untrusted entities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To verify the trustfulness of central servers (CS) in LBS.
• To propose a privacy-preserving scheme for location-based services.
• To enhance the efficiency of attribute generalization in LBS.

Main Methods:

• A game tree was employed to verify the trustfulness of the central server.
• A hash-based attribute anonymous scheme (HBAA) was developed to obfuscate user attributes.
• Security analysis and simulation experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed scheme.

Main Results:

• The trustfulness of the central server was established through game-theoretic analysis.
• The HBAA scheme effectively obfuscates user attributes, preventing the CS from accessing personal information.
• Transmitting attributes as fixed-length hash values reduced processing time and improved executive efficiency.

Conclusions:

• The proposed HBAA scheme offers a superior solution for location privacy protection in LBS.
• The scheme enhances user anonymity and data security during continuous queries.
• HBAA demonstrates improved performance and efficiency compared to existing methods.