A ranking based privilege model for privacy in location based services
Varun Sharma · 2017
Ongoing research in the field of positioning in cellular devices has led to several Location Based Services (LBSs) and its application flooding the market. However, these applications are neglecting user privacy in order to generate highly accurate results for user queries. While most traditional Location Based Service use the K-anonymity principle to blur user?s exact location information, these solutions often do not follow the safe assumptions as per the original definition of K-anonymity. This paper introduces an alternative method to provide security for Location Based Services by incorporating a fine-grained privilege model over the location information enabling end users to access varying levels of information. This is achieved by a ranked key distribution encryption and decryption strategy. Secondly, a re-stabilization algorithm is produce to maintain a consistently ranked structure if users are added or deleted from a batch. Finally, the performance of our model to existing Location Based Service model is evaluated over a commercial-grade database of points of interest.