Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Institute of Technology and Science
Engineering College, Greater Noida, India
Corresponding author details:
Rubina Shahin Zuberi
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering
Institute of Technology and Science Engineering College
Greater Noida,India
Copyright: © 2018 Zuberi RS, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Emergence of the growing Location Based Services has a potential barrier of insecurity
of users to use it due to privacy concerns. As these services requires, to broadcast constantly
the user’s locality from untrusted server to get their position based on several services. The
user will have privacy issues. LBS require trusted third party server if it is not meant to have
peer-peer architecture, limited user’s security and large number of interactions. The work
presented here implements two minor changes at two levels of LBS provision. The first one
is the client’s system software based approach which allows no-internet zones as the most
privacy protected zones. The second approach makes use of previous techniques of query
processing by k anonymising. But by and large works on hierarchical k approach based on
some intelligent selection by the clients/MOs. The results so far show an improving trend
of using t.
Location based services (LBS); Moving object {MO}; Trusted Third Party server; k-anonymity
Our dependency on mobile phones has converged with the computing World more or less into this smart ‘always with us’ device. The reason is Global data connectivity. Location Based Services (LBS) can be a location finder of the Moving Object (MO), cab finder (may eradicate cab providing services!), friend finder and could even be a family member finder! It can be an informer providing services such as those required for emergencies, fire accidents, traffic conditions, weather reporting, traffic flow information and the likes. Hence LBS are perceived to be an added local network to this global network.
Service providers are needed to deliver the location that the user wants to search. Service providers having a list of nearby hotels, gas stations & restaurants named as Query Points (QP). The database of these query points exposes user’s interests at particular times! This can be a privacy threat for most of the users. However many techniques are being developed for preventing the privacy threat pertaining to LBS. There are several levels for application of these methods. The privacy enhancing procedures may be applied at architectural level [1], security providing procedures implemented at hardware as well as software interfaces [2], privacy can be provided at the root of the threats i.e. at the database level through static as well as dynamic DBMS relating to online and offline query tracking [3] and there could be plethora of other ways to incorporate privacy enhancement methods.
This work tries to incorporate and affect most of the perspectives associated with LBS by incorporating the proposed privacy measure to directly affect static as well as dynamic DBMS. Static DBMS relates to the user data generated by the LBS providing server which could be analysed and misused by the privacy attacker. Dynamic DBMS relates to the so called ‘live’ query data generated resulting into unexpected privacy breach! We have divided the map page generated by the user (for static as well as dynamic database) into grid as done by many previous works [4,5]. Additionally we propose certain minor improvements into the application software of the user’s mobiles. Our proposed privacy enhanced system hence incorporates privacy methods primarily on- MOs device software, static and dynamic DBMS at LBS server.
MOs device Software
The application software communicating with LBS server can make some fundamental differences in the way the data bases related to the queries will be generated and hence can inculcate privacy at the primary level of the querying process. This work proposes user settings for identification of high priority areas like home, office or may be few more areas the disclosure of location can become a threat. This process however is not supposed to be mandatory for the user.
Static and Dynamic DBMS
Few invasions which may be possible with our proposed model at the
architectural or DBMS level:-
Timing attack
This is a common attack especially on road networks. Methodologies have been devised to counter the same [9,10]. The problem occurs due to time relation of the movement of MOs. As the interests of user can be tracked on the basis of time period by a well known adversary, this model tries to keep those areas away by prompting the user to send query in a highly sensitive area or not. We propose that user may deactivate the services in these highly sensitive areas to run away completely from such possibilities and can enable it again to liberally use them when he is out of these areas in the first place. When user will start using his LBS just after leaving the sensitive grid areas like home/ office, still there is a possibility of timing attack as the intelligent adversary can breach his privacy correlating the position and time of the MO. Hence our model gives this MO an extra privacy cover by maximising the k in the nearest five peripheral grid cells adjacent to the grid area where user has put his LBS off and will gradually decrease the k for every subsequent five grid cells. The five grid cells however can be any viable number in accordance with the grid cells and total grid area (figure 1).
The proposed model includes two design processes – priority hierarchy settings and static and dynamic query processing.
Priority Hierarchy Settings: Each MO requires the incorporation of option of hierarchy settings of grid area in the device’s system software which must be linked to the application software (app in case of mobiles) The settings required to be made by the user initially are identification of the high privacy areas in accordance with his/ her own priorities (which may include home, office etc.).
These settings will deactivate internet data services in the specified grid areas as soon as the MO enters those areas. Additionally high k will be set for the obfuscation software which will k-anonymize the adjacent nearest N grid cells (set by the LBS server based on grid area, road network and number of users (reference of 1). The k will be decremented by one in subsequent next N grid cells. The algorithm will run only on one map datasheet and will be recursively implemented on other map datasheets till the user uses LBS. Each user will be identified by a thread on the LBS server. This process guarantees highest privacy which is supposed to be achieved only through no connectivity zone followed by decreasing subsequent k anonymities. The proposed system hence gives much better results than the latest works of k –NN anonymisation techniques [2].
Static and dynamic query processing: The query point(s) of the concerned MO and the nearest locations and/ or query points of other MOs will be k anonymised depending on previous sections settings of privacy hierarchies. The modelling of the locations, queries, range of k anonymisation is done in two dimensions which is proposed to be increased to three dimensions (figure 2).
Figure 1: Example of a Grid Area on the map for obfuscation where p1 and p2 are the two subsequent positions of the MO, q is the query point. Distance for k the anonymisation can be radially found
Figure 2: Co-ordinate representation of grid area showing right top corner (xt, yt) And left bottom corner (xb, yb). The current location of the MO is (xu, yu) The defined query area is divided into n × n grid cells of equal size. Each grid cell being given by (c, r), where, c is the column number from left to right and r is the row number from bottom to top, respectively
The presented work is an effort towards enhancement of currently available privacy protection mechanisms. This work aims to affect live databases (real-time or continuous queries) which generally involve unreliable and inefficient dynamic DBMS. The techniques presented here are an effort towards reducing the tedious DBMS handling routines and simultaneously protecting the privacy of the users of Location Based Services which involve the internetworking.
By using double protection on the client’s system as well as on
the servers (local, ISP and LBS), the soft procedures are reduced.
Communication transceivers (MO device and server) are the actual
concerned devices required to ensure fast, reliable, privacy protected
usage of quality LBS. Thus, converging user’s connectivity to the next
level.
Figure 3: Example of k-NN anonymity after identification of
similar grids and query answer is refined accordingly
Figure 4: Query response time with respect to the width of the grid cells
Figure 5: Comparisons of Computation and Communication costs of our proposed Direct Grid System (DGS) with the Trusted Third Party (TTP) architecture [1] in terms of number of points of interests (POI)
Figure 6: Comparisons of Computation and Communication costs of our proposed Direct Grid System (DGS) with the Trusted Third Party (TTP) architecture [my iete paper] in terms of number of LBS users
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