A new scheme of preserving user privacy for location-based service

Individual privacy has been a great concern to users who need the location-based service by networked devices such as smart phones and personal computers. Usually, the provider who can provide a location-based service is regarded as semi-trusted or honest-but-curious. It leads to tremendous harmfulness for users who request this service because the dishonest service provider leaks the users' personal information. To preserve user privacy, we propose a scheme which achieves user privacy information including location, identity, and domain, while the user can still obtain the required service from a service provider. For the sake of less computational time and minimal computer power, only symmetric key cryptography is employed in our system. This scheme is secured by our security analysis, and is feasible through our imitating implementation. Compared with related schemes, our scheme can provide sufficient property to meet our requirements. Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.