A Lightweight Privacy Aware Friend Locator in Mobile Social Networks
Tao Peng, Qin Liu, Guojun Wang, Jianer Chen · 2017
Friend Locator is a popular application in Location Based Service (LBS) which notifies the mobile user if his friend is located in the nearby area. While users enjoy the services, location privacy disclosure has been a focus of security concern. Some privacy preserving schemes were proposed to protect user privacy. However, existing proposals have several limitations, such as incurring high communication overheads, providing limited privacy or requiring a fully-trusted third party (TTP). In this paper, we proposed a lightweight Privacy Aware Friend Locator (PAFL) scheme in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) environment. The PAFL scheme preserves user location privacy utilizing the technology of Order Preserving Encryption (OPE), in which TTP is not required. The server performs proximity detection by comparison directly applied to the encrypted data, having no knowledge about the user’s real location. The simulation results show that compared with some existing schemes the proposed PAFL scheme can greatly save the overheads of users and improve the efficiency of the system, while preserving users’ privacy.