ABAKA : a novel attribute-based k-anonymous collaborative solution for LBSs

Dargahi, T; Ambrosin, M; Conti, M; Asokan, N

Abstract

The increasing use of mobile devices, along with advances in telecommunication systems, increased the popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs). In LBSs, users share their exact location with a potentially untrusted Location-Based Service Provider (LBSP). In such a scenario, user privacy becomes a major con- cern: the knowledge about user location may lead to her identification as well as a continuous tracing of her position. Researchers proposed several approaches to preserve users’ location privacy. They also showed that hiding the location of an LBS user is not enough to guarantee her privacy, i.e., user’s pro- file attributes or background knowledge of an attacker may reveal the user’s identity. In this paper we propose ABAKA, a novel collaborative approach that provides identity privacy for LBS users considering users’ profile attributes. In particular, our solution guarantees p -sensitive k -anonymity for the user that sends an LBS request to the LBSP. ABAKA computes a cloaked area by collaborative multi-hop forwarding of the LBS query, and using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). We ran a thorough set of experiments to evaluate our solution: the results confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposal.

Citation

Dargahi, T., Ambrosin, M., Conti, M., & Asokan, N. (2016). ABAKA : a novel attribute-based k-anonymous collaborative solution for LBSs. Computer Communications, 85, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2016.03.002

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 7, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Apr 4, 2016
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 8, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 8, 2020
• Journal: Computer Communications
• Print ISSN: 0140-3664
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Volume: 85
• Pages: 1-13
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2016.03.002
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2016.03.002
• Related Public URLs: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/computer-communications