Time obfuscation-based privacy-preserving scheme for location-based services

Fenghua Li, Sheng Wan, Ben Niu, Hui Li, Yuanyuan He

Abstract: Privacy issues in Location-Based Services (LBSs) have gained tremendous attentions in literature over recent years. Existing approaches always fail to provide dual privacy protection on both user's location and point of interest (POI), incur endurable system overhead, and produce high quality of services, simultaneously. To address these problems, we propose a time obfuscation-based scheme, termed TOP-privacy, which carefully generates and sends some dummy queries at leisure time to confuse adversaries with some background information. TOP-privacy employs a dummy query generation algorithm, which includes a dummy location selection module and a classified POI pool construction module. It first selects some location candidates with similar location distribution with the real user's, and then determines the optimal POI to construct the dummy query based on the similarity to the user's real POI. Security analysis and evaluation results indicate its effectiveness and efficiency.