Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2007

Abstract

The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (for example, GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of location-based services. For such applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are essential. Existing privacy-enhancing techniques rely on encryption to safeguard communication channels, and on pseudonyms to protect user identities. Nevertheless, the query contents may disclose the physical location of the user. In this paper, we present a framework for preventing location-based identity inference of users who issue spatial queries to location-based services. We propose transformations based on the well-established K-anonymity concept to compute exact answers for range and nearest neighbor search, without revealing the query source. Our methods optimize the entire process of anonymizing the requests and processing the transformed spatial queries. Extensive experimental studies suggest that the proposed techniques are applicable to real-life scenarios with numerous mobile users.

Keywords

Mobile applications, Security and Privacy Protection, Spatial databases, location-based services

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Volume

19

Issue

12

First Page

1719

Last Page

1733

ISSN

1041-4347

Identifier

10.1109/TKDE.2007.190662

Publisher

IEEE

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2007.190662

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