Decentralized collaborative TTP free approach for privacy preservation in location based services

Abstract

In recent trends, growth of location based services have been increased due to the large usage of cell phones, personal digital assistant and other devices like location based navigation, emergency services, location based social networking, location based advertisement, etc. Users are provided with important information based on location to the service provider that results the compromise with their personal information like user’s identity, location privacy etc. To achieve location privacy of the user, cryptographic technique is one of the best technique which gives assurance. Location based services are classified as Trusted Third Party (TTP) & without Trusted Third Party that uses cryptographic approaches. TTP free is one of the prominent approach in which it uses peer-to-peer model. In this approach, important users mutually connect with each other to form a network to work without the use of any person/server. There are many existing approaches in literature for privacy preserving location based services, but their solutions are at high cost or not supporting scalability.  In this paper, our aim is to propose an approach along with algorithms that will help the location based services (LBS) users to provide location privacy with minimum cost and improve scalability.