A cloaking-based approach to protect location privacy in location-based services

With the widespread use of mobile devices, the location-based service (LBS) applications become increasingly popular, which introduces the new security challenge to protect user's location privacy. On one hand, a user expects to report his own location as far as possible away from his real location to protect his location privacy. On the other hand, in order to obtain high quality of service (QoS), users are required to report their locations as accurate as possible. To achieve the dedicated tradeoff between privacy requirement and QoS requirement, we propose a novel approach based on cloaking technique. We also discuss the disadvantage of the traditional general system model and propose an improved model. The basic idea of our approach is to select a sub-area from the generated cloaking area as user's reported location. The sub-area may not contain a user's real location, which prevents an adversary from performing attack with side information. Specifically, by defining an objective function with a novel location privacy metric and a QoS metric, we are able to convert the privacy issue to an optimization problem. Then, location privacy metric and QoS metric are given. To reduce the complexity of the optimization, a heuristic algorithm is proposed. Through privacy-preserving analysis and comparison with related work [8], we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.