P2LBS: Privacy Provisioning in Location-Based Services

The acceptability of a location-based service (LBS) hinges on its ability to efficiently provide service while protecting both the privacy of the customer and the server's economic interests. These include the privacy of the user, point-of-interests (POIs) privacy of the service provider, and provision for anonymous payment. Existing schemes fulfill these requirements only partially. Most of the schemes protect the query privacy of the user and the privacy of the services provided by the server, however, at high computation and communication costs. We propose a privacy-provisioning location-based service(P2LBS) scheme that provides unconditional privacy to the user's query and protects the basket of services offered by the service provider from unnecessary revelation along with an inbuilt anonymous payment scheme. To ensure the authentication of the user and the server, the P2LBS scheme uses a ring signature and anonymous payment protocol respectively. Query privacy and the services' reply privacy are provided through an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol. Results show that the P2LBS scheme is efficient compared to other current state-of-the-art schemes in terms of communication and computation costs. It fulfills all the end-to-end requirements needed to make an LBS scheme viable.

Automated summary

A privacy-provisioning location-based service (P2LBS) scheme is proposed to protect the privacy of user queries and services provided by the server, while also offering anonymous payment. The scheme utilizes ring signatures for user authentication and an anonymous payment protocol for server authentication. Query privacy and services' reply privacy are ensured through an oblivious transfer protocol. Results demonstrate that the P2LBS scheme is more efficient in terms of communication and computation costs compared to other current state-of-the-art schemes, fulfilling all the necessary requirements for a viable LBS scheme.