Efficient Privacy-preserving Processing Scheme for Location-based Queries in Mobile Cloud

With the popular development of smart phones and social networks, a large quantity of location-embedded data is collected in mobile cloud. By utilizing these data, the service providers of mobile cloud (MCSP) can provide users with great convenience by location-based queries. Thus the mobile cloud service system (MCSS) comes into being. However, the MCSP are untrustworthy, and the location itself contains much privacy information. Hence, the data publishers always encrypt the location information before publishing it. But it brings a great challenge, that how to utilize the encrypted information efficiently. To solve this problem, this paper designs an efficient privacy-preserving processing scheme for location-based queries in mobile cloud. We adapt the RSA algorithm, and combine it with ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) approach. The proposed scheme achieves fine-grained access control over location information, efficient and privacy-preserving location distance computation and comparison. The performance evaluation shows that our scheme is efficient enough to be applied into MCSS.