Anonymity and Privacy Security Scheme on Location Based Services

Abstract

Anonymity and privacy are two security services frequently confused when schemes are designed. On the one hand, privacy refers to transform information in order to keep it from all but those who are authorized to have it. On the other hand, anonymity refers to a condition in which the information receiver does not know the sender’s identity. From the Location Based Service (LBS) point of view, anonymity and privacy are security services very important to preserve, as sensitive data travel in a service request, for example the identity of participants and their location. Most of the related work focuses on protecting only one aspect of the LBS user letting secure only one aspect. in this paper we present a security scheme that consists on a set of cryptographic protocols which consider cryptographic primitives along with fake location information, in order to provide both identity anonymity and location privacy. The importance of this work relies on the fact that the proposed scheme remains transparent to the LBS provider. Moreover, the results obtained show that this approach focused on removing the trust from the LBS provider, did not represent an excessive increment on the cost and usage of the channel that makes our scheme a suitable and interesting improvement over previous works.