On Enhancement of 'Share The Secret' Scheme for Location Privacy

Since location information is considered as personal information, location privacy has been emerged as one of the most important security concerns. In this paper, we enhance the 'Share The Secret' (STS) scheme, a privacy mechanism that segments location information into pieces (shares), distributes the shares to multiple untrustworthy location servers, and reconstructs the original location on authorized entities. We introduce certain policies based on the theory of optimal stopping in order to achieve time-optimized decisions for different levels of privacy. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of STS in terms of communication and computation load, and energy consumption. Experimental results quantify the benefits stemming for STS adoption.