Personalized Location Privacy Protection for Location-Based Services in Vehicular Networks

With the development of vehicular network, location-based services (LBSs) provide increasing diversified services for drivers and passengers. When users enjoy the services, users' location needs to be constantly updated to service providers, which causes the location information to be speculated and attacked by attackers. However, existing schemes don't provide differentiated protection for users' different locations, which may lead to the leakage of location information. Therefore, we propose a location privacy protection method to satisfy users' personalized privacy needs with reasonable protection of their privacy. Firstly, we define a normalized decision matrix to describe the efficiency and privacy effects of a route, and establish a multi-attribute utility function to quantify the utility of different routes for route selection. Then, according to users' personalized privacy protection need, we allocate the privacy budget for each query location on the selected route based on the distance between it and his nearest sensitive location. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to existing methods, our scheme can meet the user's service requirements and achieve better service quality under the conditions of reasonable protection of their privacy.