An Efficient Approach for Privacy-Preserving of the Client’s Location and Query in M-Business Supplying LBS Services

• Published in: International journal of wireless information networks Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 433 - 454
• Main Authors: Aloui, Ahmed, Kazar, Okba, Bourekkache, Samir, Omary, Fouzia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-09-2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Algorithms; Business; Clients; Dummies; Electrical Engineering; Engineering; Location based services; Performance evaluation; Privacy; Quality of service; Queries; Query processing; Client privacy protection; Privacy preservation; Query privacy; Mobility; k-Anonymity; Security; Continuous query; Cloaking; Location privacy; Quality of service (QoS); Mobile business (m-business); Similarity of movement; Clique; l-Diversity; Location-based services (LBS); Dummy
• ISSN: 1068-9605; 1572-8129
• DOI: 10.1007/s10776-020-00478-4

Privacy-preserving in mobile business supplying location-based services (LBS) has the potential to become a primary concern for clients and service providers. In m-business providing LBS services, a client sends its exact locations to service providers. This data may involve sensitive and private personal information. Therefore, the misuse of location information by service providers creates privacy issues for clients. Moreover, the query must not be linked to the mobile client, even if the location information is exposed willingly by her/him to obtain specific services. Thus, there are location cloaking algorithms that allow the protection of the location privacy of mobile users. Hence, many temporal and spatial approaches to cloaking a specific user’s location have been proposed. Different from the existing methods, the current works define location and query privacy separately. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the issues related to the mobile client privacy. Mainly, we aim to preserve the client location privacy as well as the continuous queries privacy, where mobile clients continuously emit different queries during their travels. It’s on this premise that we propose a new clique-based cloaking algorithm named Mobile Clique Cloak (MCC) to preserve the mobile client’s privacy in the M-business providing LBS services. Also, to build the cloaking region in our approach, we take into account the similarity of client velocity and direction to obtain a right balance between quality of service QoS and privacy. Furthermore, we generate different realistic dummies instead of dropping the query; thus, all queries will be processed even in the case of k−1 other mobile clients’ queries cannot be found. Moreover, our work deals with a series of attacks in the same cloaking process (location attack, tracking attack, query sampling attacks and homogenous attack). We evaluate our approach from three aspects: privacy guaranty, quality of service and performance. Experimental evaluation of our algorithms on a real world map shows that our approach ensures total privacy for clients and protects the privacy of clients during the entire query period whiles allowing clients’ choice of privacy requirements. Besides, we compare our algorithm with existing privacy protection algorithms such as V-DCA, D-TC and GCA. According to the evaluation results and a comparison of the algorithms, our algorithm MCC can make a good balance between quality of service, performance and privacy.