BL0K: A New Stage of Privacy-Preserving Scope for Location-Based Services

Location-based services present an inherent challenge of finding the delicate balance between efficiency when answering queries and maintaining user privacy. Inevitable security issues arise as the server needs to be informed of the query location to provide accurate responses. Despite the many advancements in localization security in wireless sensor networks, servers can still be infected with malicious software. It is now possible to ensure queries do not generate any fake responses that may appear real to users. When a fake response is used, there are mechanisms that can be employed so that the user can identify the authenticity of the query. For this reason, this paper proposes Bloom Filter 0 Knowledge (BL0K), which is novel phase privacy method that preserves the framework for location-based service (LBS) and combines a Bloom filter and the Zero knowledge protocol. The usefulness of these methods has been shown for securing private user information. Analysis of the results demonstrated that BL0K performance is decidedly better when compared to the referenced approaches using the privacy entropy metric.