Dummy Location Selection Scheme for K-anonymity in Location based Services

Location-Based Service (LBS) becomes increasingly important for our daily life. However, the localization information in the air is vulnerable to various attacks, which result in serious privacy concerns. To overcome this problem, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem with considering both the query probability and the practical dummy location region. A low complexity dummy location selection scheme is proposed. We first find several candidate dummy locations with similar query probabilities. Among these selected candidates, a cloaking area based algorithm is then offered to find K - 1 dummy locations to achieve K-anonymity. The intersected area between two dummy locations is also derived to assist to determine the total cloaking area. Security analysis verifies the effectiveness of our scheme against the passive and active adversaries. Compared with other methods, simulation results show that the proposed dummy location scheme can improve the privacy level and enlarge the cloaking area simultaneously.