New Approach for Privacy-Aware Location-Based Service Communications

Location-based services (LBS) are very popular for personal communications in the mobile Internet. In such applications, users make use of the mobile devices to obtain the information of the nearest gas stations, restaurants, banks etc from service provider (SP), as well as identification of the optimal route to reach destination according to user position. Obviously, location data is effective for service provisioning. Therefore, the privacy threat is the inherent problem in LBS. Previous known solutions for privacy-preserving LBS require to blind the location data to SP. Consequently, it certainly suffers from a privacy/quality of service trade-off. We present a new approach to handle such problem for privacy-aware LBS communications. In our protocol, the user submits the exact location to SP to obtain the high quality service, while his location data and the communication transcript cannot be the evidence to be obtained by any third party. Hence the privacy of this user is preserved. We take the deniable (ring) authentication as the building blocks. In this way, it is not necessary for the user to provide coarse location information which would degrade the service quality certainly.