Location-based queries enable fundamental services for mobile road network travelers. While the benefits of location-based services (LBS) are numerous, exposure of mobile travelers' location information to untrusted LBS providers may lead to privacy breaches. In this paper, we propose StarCloak, a utility-aware and attack-resilient approach to building a privacy-preserving query system for mobile users traveling on road networks. StarCloak has several desirable properties. First, StarCloak supports user-defined k-user anonymity and l-segment indistinguishability, along with user-specified spatial and temporal utility constraints, for utility-aware and personalized location privacy. Second, unlike conventional solutions which are indifferent to underlying road network structure, StarCloak uses the concept of stars and proposes cloaking graphs for effective location cloaking on road networks. Third, StarCloak achieves strong attack-resilience against replay and query injection-based attacks through randomized star selection and pruning. Finally, to enable scalable query processing with high throughput, StarCloak makes cost-aware star selection decisions by considering query evaluation and network communication costs. We evaluate StarCloak on two real-world road network datasets under various privacy and utility constraints. Results show that StarCloak achieves improved query success rate and throughput, reduced anonymization time and network usage, and higher attack-resilience in comparison to XStar, its most relevant competitor.
falls under the location obfuscation category. Under this category, Mouratidis and Yiu @cite_10 provide @math -anonymity for road network travelers under the reciprocity requirement. @cite_6 support personalized privacy specifications such that a cloaked region satisfies @math -anonymity and includes a total minimum segment length of @math . Li and Palanisamy @cite_1 propose cloaking schemes such that anonymity levels can be reduced to accommodate multi-level privacy and selective de-anonymization. @cite_28 study the orthogonal problem of , and define the M-cut requirement to achieve path privacy. A similar path privacy problem is studied in @cite_24 . Another orthogonal problem is semantic-aware and privacy-preserving sharing of sensitive locations under road network constraints @cite_3 @cite_19 . In contrast, does not require semantic annotation. Most closely related to our work under this category is @cite_25 . We empirically compare against and show that is superior to in several aspects.
@cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_10 @cite_25
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The spatial query has been one of the highly demanded services in mobile computing system recently. To protect users' location privacy, existing architecture provides a trustworthy anonymizer to blur users' location from the service provider. However, with mobile capability, users' location extends from one spot to a continuous traveling route. For such continuous spatial query, it raises much more challenges for an anonymizer to protect users' continuous privacy. This paper conducts research on ensuring users' location privacy under the network-constrained road network environments. We first argue that the concept of continuous location privacy should be transferred to users' path privacy, which are consecutive road segments that needs to be protected. A novel M-cut requirement is proposed to achieve the goal of user path privacy. Mobile users can customize their privacy level through M-cut requirement. Last, two methods of constructing the cloaked spatial region are provided in our research, namely Random Selection and Junction Sharing. These algorithms support path privacy and also take system computation and communication overhead into consideration. With advances in sensing and positioning technology, fueled by the ubiquitous deployment of wireless networks, location-aware computing has become a fundamental model for offering a wide range of life enhancing services. However, the ability to locate users and mobile objects opens doors for new threats - the intrusion of location privacy. Location anonymization refers to the process of perturbing the exact location of users as a cloaking region such that a user's location becomes indistinguishable from the location of a set of other users. A fundamental limitation of existing location anonymization techniques is that location information once perturbed to provide a certain anonymity level cannot be reversed to reduce anonymity or the degree of perturbation. This is especially a serious limiting factor in multi-level privacy-controlled scenarios where different users of the location information have different levels of access. This paper presents ReverseCloak, a new class of reversible location cloaking mechanisms that effectively support multi-level location privacy, allowing selective de-anonymization of the cloaking region to reduce the granularity of the perturbed location when suitable access credentials are provided. We evaluate the ReverseCloak techniques through extensive experiments on realistic road network traces generated by GTMobiSim. Our experiments show that the proposed techniques are efficient, scalable and provide the required level of privacy. Recently, several techniques have been proposed to protect the user location privacy for location-based services in the Euclidean space. Applying these techniques directly to the road network environment would lead to privacy leakage and inefficient query processing. In this paper, we propose a new location anonymization algorithm that is designed specifically for the road network environment. Our algorithm relies on the commonly used concept of spatial cloaking, where a user location is cloaked into a set of connected road segments of a minimum total length @math including at least @math users. Our algorithm is "query-aware" as it takes into account the query execution cost at a database server and the query quality, i.e., the number of objects returned to users by the database server, during the location anonymization process. In particular, we develop a new cost function that balances between the query execution cost and the query quality. Then, we introduce two versions of our algorithm, namely, pure greedy and randomized greedy, that aim to minimize the developed cost function and satisfy the user specified privacy requirements. To accommodate intervals with a high workload, we introduce a shared execution paradigm that boosts the scalability of our location anonymization algorithm and the database server to support large numbers of queries received in a short time period. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithms are more efficient and scalable than the state-of-the-art technique, in terms of both query execution cost and query quality. The results also show that our algorithms have very strong resilience to two privacy attacks, namely, the replay attack and the center-of-cloaked-area attack. This paper presents a privacy-preserving framework for the protection of sensitive positions in real time trajectories. We assume a scenario in which the sensitivity of user's positions is space-varying, and so depends on the spatial context, while the user's movement is confined to road networks and places. Typical users are the non-anonymous members of a geo-social network who agree to share their exact position whenever such position does not fall within a sensitive place, e.g. a hospital. Suspending location sharing while the user is inside a sensitive place is not an appropriate solution because the user's stopovers can be easily inferred from the user's trace. In this paper we present an extension of the semantic location cloaking model [1] originally developed for the cloaking of non-correlated positions in an unconstrained space. We investigate different algorithms for the generation of cloaked regions over the graph representing the urban setting. We also integrate methods to prevent velocity based linkage attacks. Finally we evaluate experimentally the algorithms using a real data set. Many applications of location based services (LBSs), it is useful or even necessary to ensure that LBSs services determine their location. For continuous queries where users report their locations periodically, attackers can infer more about users' privacy by analyzing the correlations of their query samples. The causes of path privacy problems, which emerge because the communication by different users in road network using location based services so, attacker can track continuous query information. LBSs, albeit useful and convenient, pose a serious threat to users' path privacy as they are enticed to reveal their locations to LBS providers via their queries for location-based information. Traditional path privacy solutions designed in Euclidean space can be hardly applied to road network environment because of their ignorance of network topological properties. In this paper, we proposed a novel dynamic path privacy protection scheme for continuous query service in road networks. Our scheme also conceals DPP (Dynamic Path Privacy) users' identities from adversaries; this is provided in initiator untraceability property of the scheme. We choose the different attack as our defending target because it is a particularly challenging attack that can be successfully launched without compromising any user or having access to any cryptographic keys. The security analysis shows that the model can effectively protect the user identity anonymous, location information and service content in LBSs. All simulation results confirm that our Dynamic Path Privacy scheme is not only more accurate than the related schemes, but also provide better locatable ratio where the highest it can be around 95 of unknown nodes those can estimate their position. Furthermore, the scheme has good computation cost as well as communication and storage costs.Simulation results show that Dynamic Path Privacy has better performances compared to some related region based algorithms such as IAPIT scheme, half symmetric lens based localization algorithm (HSL) and sequential approximate maximum a posteriori (AMAP) estimator scheme. In this paper, we address the topic of location privacy preservation of mobile users on road networks. Most existing techniques of privacy preservation rely on structure-based spatial cloaking, but pay little attention to location semantic information. Yet, location semantic information may disclose sensitive information about mobile users. Thus, we propose CloSed, a semantic-awareness privacy preservation model to protect users' privacy from violation. We design cloaked sets that should cover different semantic regions of road networks as well as satisfy quality of service QoS. As the problem of calculating the optimal cloaked set is NP-hard, we design a greedy algorithm that balances QoS and privacy requirements. Extensive experiments evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in providing privacy guarantees on large real-world datasets. The increasing availability of location-aware mobile devices has given rise to a flurry of location-based services (LBSs). Due to the nature of spatial queries, an LBS needs the user position in order to process her requests. On the other hand, revealing exact user locations to a (potentially untrusted) LBS may pinpoint their identities and breach their privacy. To address this issue, spatial anonymity techniques obfuscate user locations, forwarding to the LBS a sufficiently large region instead. Existing methods explicitly target processing in the euclidean space and do not apply when proximity to the users is defined according to network distance (e.g., driving time through the roads of a city). In this paper, we propose a framework for anonymous query processing in road networks. We design location obfuscation techniques that: (1) provide anonymous LBS access to the users and (2) allow efficient query processing at the LBS side. Our techniques exploit existing network database infrastructure, requiring no specialized storage schemes or functionalities. We experimentally compare alternative designs in real road networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques. Consider a mobile client who travels over roads and wishes to receive location-based services (LBS) from untrusted service providers. How might the user obtain such services without exposing her private position information? Meanwhile, how could the privacy protection mechanism incur no disincentive, e.g., excessive computation or communication cost, for any service provider or mobile user to participate in such a scheme? We detail this problem and present a general model for privacy-aware mobile services. A series of key features distinguish our solution from existing ones: a) it adopts the network-constrained mobility model (instead of the conventional random-waypoint model) to capture the privacy vulnerability of mobile users; b) it regards the attack resilience (for mobile users) and the query-processing cost (for service providers) as two critical measures for designing location privatization solutions, and provides corresponding analytical models; c) it proposes a robust and scalable location anonymization model, XStar, which best leverages the two measures; d) it introduces multi-folded optimizations in implementing XStar, which lead to further performance improvement. A comprehensive experimental evaluation is conducted to validate the analytical models and the efficacy of XStar.