Privacy Protection Model for Location-Based Services

Solving the disclosure problem of sensitive information with the k-nearest neighbor query, location dummy technique, or interfering data in location-based services (LBSs) is a new research topic. Although they reduced security threats, previous studies will be ineffective in the case of sparse users or K-successive privacy, and additional calculations will deteriorate the performance of LBS application systems. Therefore, a model is proposed herein, which is based on geohash-encoding technology instead of latitude and longitude, memcached server cluster, encryption and decryption, and authentication. Simulation results based on PHP and MySQL show that the model offers approximately 10x speedup over the conventional approach. Two problems are solved using the model: sensitive information in LBS application is not disclosed, and the relationship between an individual and a track is not leaked.