A Peer-to-Peer Spatial Cloaking Algorithm for Anonymous Location-based Services

This paper tackles a major privacy threat in current location-based services where users have to report their exact locations to the database server in order to obtain their desired services. For example, a mobile user asking about her nearest restaurant has to report her exact location. With untrusted service providers, reporting private location in- formation may lead to several privacy threats. In this paper, we present a peer-to-peer (P2P) spatial cloaking algorithm in which mobile and stationary users can entertain location-based services without revealing their exact location information. The main idea is that before requesting any location-based service, the mobile user will form a group from her peers via single-hop communication and/or multi-hop routing. Then, the spatial cloaked area is computed as the region that covers the entire group of peers. Two modes of operations are supported within the proposed P2P spatial cloaking algorithm, namely, the on-demand mode and the proac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ACM GIS
• Authors: Chi-Yin Chow, Mohamed F. Mokbel, Xuan Liu
• Keywords: Location Privacy, Peer-to-peer Systems