Semantic-Aware Obfuscation for Location Privacy at Database Level

Abstract

Part 1: Information and Communication Technology- Eurasia Conference (ICT-EurAsia)International audienceAlthough many techniques have been proposed to deal with location privacy problem, which is one of popular research issues in location based services, some limitations still remain and hence they cannot be applied to the real world. One of the most typical proposed techniques is obfuscation that preserves location privacy by degrading the quality of user’s location information. But the less exact information, the more secure and the less effective services can be supported. Thus the goal of obfuscated techniques is balancing between privacy and quality of services. However, most of obfuscated techniques are separated from database level, leading to other security and performance issues. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to protect location privacy at database level, called Semantic Bob-tree, an index structure that is based on Bdual-tree and Bob-tree and contains semantic aware information in its nodes. It can achieve high level of privacy and keep up the quality of services

On Efficient Processing of Complicated Cloaked Region for Location Privacy Aware Nearest-Neighbor Queries

“…With the new Query Processor's Vertices Reduction Paradigm and its tuning parameter ε, complicated polygonal [12][13][14][15] and circular [6] cloaked regions are handled efficiently. The main idea is that we employ the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm to simplify the region's polygon before processing it.…”

“…It acts as a middle layer between the user and the LBS Provider to reduce the location information quality in the LBS request. The quality reduction is performed by the obfuscation algorithm which transforms the location to be more general (i.e., from a point to a set of points [9], a rectilinear region [10][11][12][13][14][15], or a circular region [6], etc.). The request is then sent to the LBS Provider to process without the provider knowing the user's exact location.…”

Location Privacy-Aware Nearest-Neighbor Query with Complex Cloaked Regions

“…In anonymous LBS (e.g., navigation), this category of algorithms aims for the protection of identity privacy. -Obfuscation: to make user location imprecise or inaccurate or generalize the location into a region [8], [4], [3], [6], [14], [15]. Generally, this process is done by the means of perturbation, adding dummies, reducing precision or location hiding.…”

“…It acts as a middle layer between the user and the LBS Provider to reduce the location information quality in the LBS request. The quality reduction is performed by the obfuscation algorithm which transforms the exact location to be more general (i.e., from a point to a set of points [3], a rectilinear region [4], [5], [6], [7], or a circular region [8], [9], etc.). The request is then sent to the LBS Provider to process without the provider knowing the user's exact location.…”

Location Privacy Preservation Mechanism for Location-Based Service With Incomplete Location Data

“…The key idea of these methods is to avoid direct requests to the server of LBS from real request locations. Broadly speaking, existing works of location privacy-preserving can be classified into three categories: offset method [5]- [7], dummy method [2], [3], [8]- [11] and spatial cloaking method [4], [12]- [15]. The offset method is easy to implement but has poor availability.…”