Two Practical Attribute-Based Encryption Schemes for Privacy-Preserving Mobile Location-Sharing Applications

Location sharing, as an essential component of mobile applications, helps mobile users share location information and enhance their community connections. However, users may be reluctant to share their locations with personal privacy concerns, as anyone including location server who knows these locations can infer much sensitive information about users through analyzing these locations’ information plus their background knowledge. Therefore, it poses a natural question for mobile location-sharing applications how to share users’ locations without any breach of their privacy. To answer this question, in this article, we describe two practical attribute-based encryption schemes served privacy-preserving mobile location-sharing applications. Our proposals are quite suitable for such a mobile application—location sharing with common interests since in our designs users’ interests are also taken into consideration as well as location information. In particular, our two schemes have a higher performance in the sense that in our first construction both ciphertexts and private keys are of constant size simultaneously, and our second construction is an extension of the first that provides a tradeoff between ciphertext size and public-key size. Therefore, the two schemes we designed in this work are quite practical in mobile applications which are often equipped with limited transmission or storage resources. Finally, we offer a formal security proof under a well-defined security model, followed by an experimental evaluation and a theoretical performance comparison.