Fog-Assisted Privacy Preservation Scheme for Location-Based Services Based on Trust Relationship

Introduction

The widespread use of mobile phones with positioning capabilities has created the demand for location-based services (LBSs). The LBS need the real-time location of the user to avail the service. The tremendous opportunities in LBS have influenced the business sectors to use LBS to promote their products and services. The most popular among the location-based services are navigation service, friend finder, emergency rescue and points of interest (POI). The information shared such as location, timing and identity have led to privacy disclosure risks and the long-term information gathering unveils the user's profile. In general, it is common that the more the personal information is shared and processed, the more threatening the user becomes. The user could receive location-based advertisements and unsolicited marketing, related to the information shared by the user. The user profiling uncovers their religious beliefs, political interest, health-related information, living habits, location-time pairs of user’s presence and so on. The user’s hesitation on location-based service usage is growing, leading the research on various protection schemes. Existing literature reveals that the dominant approaches are trusted third party-based privacy protection models (TTP) (Chen et al., 2018), and the majority of such methods use encryption algorithm and, most of them are prone to dual identity attacks (Shao, Lu, & Lin, 2014). The proposed scheme incorporates the fog server to cache the query information locally and to eliminate the redundant query submission to the location service provider (LSP). In addition, the users choose the helper from their vicinity, which is based on the trust relationship in order to hide their identity from the fog server. The main focus of the proposed work is as follows:

• 1.

  To design the privacy preservation scheme for location-based services using fog servers and trusted helpers to protects the user’s location and trajectory.

• 2.

  To protect the location information and the user's identity from the system entities.

• 3.

  Eliminate duplicate queries arriving at the LSP from the same location using fog servers, thereby saving communication overhead and ensuring the privacy protection of the users.