Abstract
People nowadays rely heavily on technology and prefer being provided with personalized services. Location based services (LBS) are one of those highly popular services. Users provide their location information in some query to the LBS server, which in turn processes the query and returns personalized results. The major concern when dealing with these services is the privacy issue. Mainly, there are two privacy issues, the user’s identity and the user’s location. Not securing such information could result in some threats to the user. To preserve the user’s privacy, researchers have proposed spatial cloaking to blur the user’s location by a trusted location anonymizer server. Existing methods suffer from high communication cost due to the large number of communication rounds between the user’s device and the cloud server to answer the query. In this paper, we propose an efficient k-anonymity algorithm, called Aman, to compute the cloaked area with minimal number of communication rounds between the user and the cloud server. Unlike existing methods in which the server starts the search from the root or the leaves of the indexing structure, Aman algorithm reduces the search time by starting the search at an intermediate estimated level of the indexing structure that is as close as possible to the queried location. To preserve the user’s privacy, Aman uses k-anonymity cloaking to hide the user’s location. The experimental results using synthetic and real datasets show that Aman outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bilogrevic I, Jadliwala M, Kalkan K, Hubaux J-P, Aad I (2011) Privacy in mobile computing for location-sharing-based services. In: ACM international conference on PETS
Chow C-Y, Mokbel MF, Liu X (2006) A peer-to-peer spatial cloaking algorithm for anonymous location-based service. In: 14th ACM international symposium on advances in geographic information systems, pp 171–178
Chow C-Y, Mokbel MF, Liu X (2011) Spatial cloaking for anonymous location-based services in mobile peer-to-peer environments. GeoInformatica 15(2):351–380
Gedik B, Liu L (2008) Protecting location privacy with personalized kanonymity: architecture and algorithms. IEEE Trans Mob Comput 7(1):1–18
Ghinita G, Kalnis P, Skiadopoulos S (2007) Mobihide: a mobilea peert-o-peer system for anonymous location-based queries. In: ACM international conference on SSTD
Gruteser M, Grunwald D (2003) Anonymous usage of location-based services through spatial and temporal cloaking. In: ACM 1st international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, pp 31–42
Hu H, Xu J (2009) Non-exposure location anonymity. In: Data engineering, IEEE 25th international conference on, pp 1120–1131
Kido H, Yanagisawa Y, Satoh T (2005) An anonymous communication technique using dummies for location-based services. In: IEEE international conference on pervasive services, pp 88–97
Lee H, Oh B-S, Kim H-i, Chang J (2012) Grid-based cloaking area creation scheme supporting continuous location-based services. In: ACM international symposium on applied computing
Li Q, Cao G (2014) Providing efficient privacy-aware incentives for mobile sensing. In: IEEE international conference on distributed computing systems
Manweiler J, Scudellari R, Cox LP (2009) SMILE: encounter-based trust for mobile social services. In: 16th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, pp 246–255
Mascetti S, Freni D, Bettini C, Wang XS, Jajodia S (2008) On the impact of user movement simulations in the evaluation of lbs privacy-preserving techniques. In: International workshop on privacy in location-based applications, Malaga, Spain, pp. 61–80
Mokbel MF, Chow C-Y, Aref WG (2006) The new casper: query processing for location services without compromising privacy. In: 32nd international conference on very large data bases, pp 763–774
Niu B, Li Q, Zhu X, Cao G, Li H (2014a) Achieving k-anonymity in privacy-aware location-based services. In: IEEE INFOCOM, pp 754–762
Niu B, Li Q, Zhu X, Li H (2014b) A fine-grained spatial cloaking scheme for privacy-aware users in location-based services. In: 23rd international conference on computer communications and networks
Niu B, Zhu X, Li Q, Chen J, Li H (2015) A novel attack to spatial cloaking schemes in location-based services. Future Gen Comput Syst 49:125–132
Pingley A, Yu W, Zhang N, Fu X, Zhao W (2009) CAP: a context-aware privacy protection system for location-based services. In: 29th IEEE international conference on distributed computing systems, pp 49–57
Shin K, Ju X, Chen Z, Hu X (2012) Privacy protection for users of location-based services. IEEE Wirel Commun 19(1):30–39
Veal B, Li K, lowenthal D (2005) New methods for passive estimation of TCP round-trip times. In: Springer passive and active network measurement, pp 121–134
Wang S, Wang XS (2010) In-device spatial cloaking for mobile users privacy assisted by the cloud. In: 11th international conference on mobile data management, pp 381–386
Xu T, Cai Y (2008) Exploring historical location data for anonymity preservation in location-based services. In: IEEE 27th conference on computer communications
Xu T, Cai Y (2009) Feeling-based location privacy protection for location-based services. In: 16th ACM international conference on computer and communications security, pp 348–357
Zhu X, Chi H, Niu B, Zhang W, Li Z, Li H (2013) Mobicache: when k-anonymity meets cache. In: IEEE GLOBECOM
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jadallah, H., Al Aghbari, Z. Spatial cloaking for location-based queries in the cloud. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 10, 3339–3347 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-018-0767-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-018-0767-6