Anonymous Processing of Query in Road Networks
Sravan KumarTappa, Chintakindi Srinivas · 2013
The increasing availability of locationaware mobile deviceshas given rise to a flurry of location-based services (LBS). Due to thenature of spatial queries, an LBS needs the user position in order to processthe requests. On the other hand, revealing exact user locations to (potentially untrusted) LBS may pinpoint their identities and breach theirprivacy. To address this issue, spatial anonymity techniques obfuscateuser 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 tonetwork distance (e.g., driving time through the roads of a city). In thispaper, we propose a framework for anonymous query processing in roadnetworks. We design location obfuscation techniques that (i) provideanonymous LBS access to the users, and (ii) allow efficient queryprocessing at the LBS side. Our techniques exploit existing networkdatabase infrastructure, requiring no specialized storage schemes orfunctionalities. We experimentally compare alternative designs in realroad networks and demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques.