A New Location Privacy Protection Scheme for Multi-users

Many applications in location-based services require multiple users to share location. However, the traditional rigid policy of privacy protection forces users to share and expose their precise locations. In order to meet the user's personalized needs for privacy protection, a new multi-user location sharing privacy protection scheme was proposed in this paper. Two kinds of location conversion models were used in our solution to ensure that users can flexibly customize their shared locations with different precision levels. Then all the location data with different precisions is packaged and converted through a multi-secret sharing mechanism based on the Chinese Remaining Theorem. In this mechanism, only one time shares-distribution was needed to realize different shared objects recover location information with corresponding different accuracies. In the security analysis, it is proved that the flexible location privacy protection of multi-user location sharing was realized in an untrusted net environment by our solution. It is highly secure since it does not depend on the trustability of the location provider and can resist single location server attack, collusion attacks of multiple location servers and multiple users. Furthermore, compared with the peer solutions, the simulation experiments showed that ours is more efficient and stable in performance. When the number of location servers participating in the share storage increases or the higher-precision location information is required to be reconstructed, the overheads of computation and communication will not increase dramatically. Thus, it is also applicable in the resource-constrained network environment. Copyright ©2020 Advanced Engineering Sciences. All rights reserved.