An Advanced Dummy Position-Based Privacy Provisioning Framework for TTP-Based LBS System

A location-based service (LBS) is an IP-capable mobile device application that requires an understanding of where the mobile device is placed. The LBS is renowned for providing quick services to clients. The extensive praxis of the LBS has led to a keen interest in user privacy, a fundamental requirement of every user. As such, the LBS is primarily concerned with protecting users’ privacy. Three basic metrics are related to confidentiality in the LBS system: temporal, identity, and spatial privacy. Losing someone’s privacy attribute can ultimately interfere with a user’s privacy. To cope with this problem, we introduce a novel advanced Dummy Position-based Anonymization (ADPA) mechanism to achieve the confidentiality of mobile users who frequently use the LBS. The proposed ADPA technique is based on an adaptive fixed k-anonymization (A-Kf) technique that utilizes the characteristics of a trusted third-party (TTP) server and the cloaking region. User privacy is achieved by shielding all three attributes of privacy (spatial, temporal, and identity), for which dummy generation, query processing by anonymization server, and LBS server processing algorithms were designed to shield user confidentiality. Extensive simulations were also carried out to evaluate the efficiency of the model.