3D Geo-Indistinguishability for Indoor Location-Based Services

Indoor location-based services (LBS) are widely used in large-scale indoor buildings, such as high-rise hospitals and multi-story shopping malls. At the same time, location privacy protection in such three-dimensional (3D) space has recently attracted considerable attention. Currently, most existing location privacy protection schemes focus on two-dimensional (2D) location protection and fail to prevent location inference attacks when the user’s location data include height dimension, i.e., 3D geolocation. Enlightened by the concept of differential privacy, in this paper we first study the impact factors of the degree of indistinguishability of 3D geolocations. Then, we quantify location privacy for LBS applications in the 3D space with geo-indistinguishability (3D-GI) rigorously and provably. We develop a mechanism of three-variates Laplacian to generate perturbed locations considering the locations’ X, Y, and Z-coordinates simultaneously, guaranteeing geo-indistinguishability. Furthermore, the discretization noise-adding mechanism is studied to satisfy geo-indistinguishability in the 3D space under the finite precision of hardware/devices. Considering the discretized mechanism can only satisfy geo-indistinguishability in finite 3D space and users visit the limited regions, we further study the truncation of the Laplacian mechanism to limit the generated perturbed locations within a specific region. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed 3D-GI outperforms the benchmarks while guaranteeing privacy regardless of the adversary’s prior knowledge.