A Privacy-Preserving Location-Based System for Continuous Spatial Queries

Abstract

K-anonymization generated a cloaked region (CR) that was K-anonymous; that is, the query issuer was indistinguishable from K-1 other users (nearest neighbors) within the CR. This reduced the probability of the query issuer’s location being exposed to untrusted parties (1/K). However, location cloaking is vulnerable to query tracking attacks, wherein the adversary can infer the query issuer by comparing the two regions in continuous LBS queries. This paper proposes a novel location cloaking method to resist this attack. The target systems of the proposed method are road networks where the mobile clients’ trajectories are fixed (the road network is preknown and fixed, instead of the trajectories), such as subways, railways, and highways. The proposed method, called adaptive-fixed K-anonymization (A-KF), takes this issue into account and generates smaller CRs without compromising the privacy of the query issuer’s location. Our results show that the proposed A-KF method outperforms previous location cloaking methods.