Jointly Preserving Subject and Object Anonymity in Nearby Friends Querying for Curious Service Providers

Abstract

This work studies the urban area location privacy preserving location updates and nearby friends (NF) querying for the centralized proximity based services (PBSs). The urban area constraint forces the user mobility to be on the city road network, modeled as a weighted directed graph. The location privacy model exploits location anonymity through subgraph cloaking. Two kinds of location privacy issues have been identified and handled in a unified framework, (i) Subject Anonymity on location updates, i.e., providing location anonymity of the location updater (against the curious PBS provider), and (ii) Object Anonymity on NF querying, i.e., providing location anonymity of friends in NF query responses (against the curious query issuer). In the former, the user simulates the PBS provider's belief (a subgraph) on his location whereabouts, and locally blocks anonymity violating location update requests which is understood by a simulated attack. In the latter, as the NF query processor, the PBS provider simulates the user's mutual beliefs (subgraphs) on friends' location whereabouts obtained through previous NF queries. By a simulated attack, some friends' existence are suppressed from the NF query responses. An experimental evaluation on a real dataset has been conducted. © 2024 ACM.