Location privacy preserving techniques for location based services over road networks

With the rapid development of wireless and mobile technologies (LBS, Privacy of personal location information in location-based services of a vehicle ad-hoc network (VANET) users is becoming an increasingly important issue. LBSs provide enhanced functionalities, they open up new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause security and privacy breaches. During communication in LBSs, individuals (vehicle users) face privacy risks (for example location privacy, identity privacy, data privacy etc.) when providing personal location data to potentially untrusted LBSs. However, as vehicle users with mobile (or wireless) devices are highly autonomous and heterogeneous, it is challenging to design generic location privacy protection techniques with desired level of protection. Location privacy is an important issue in vehicular networks since knowledge of a vehicle's location can result in leakage of sensitive information. This paper focuses and discussed on both potential location privacy threats and preserving mechanisms in LBSs over road networks. The proposed research in this paper carries significant intellectual merits and potential broader impacts i.e. a) investigate the impact of inferential attacks (for example inference attack, position co-relation attack, transition attack and timing attack etc.) in LBSs for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) users, and proves the vulnerability of using long-term pseudonyms (or other approaches like silent period, random encryption period etc.) for camouflaging users' real identities. b) An effective and extensible location privacy architecture based on the one approach like mix zone model with other approaches to protect location privacy are discussed. c) This paper addresses the location privacy preservation problems in details from a novel angle and provides a solid foundation for future research to protecting user's location information.