iPDA:
Privacy-Preserving Location-based Data Access in Mobile Environments*
[Abstract]
Recent advances in wireless communications and location positioning technologies have made possible the provision of location based services (LBS) to mobile users. With a location-aware wireless device, a mobile user is able to query his/her surroundings (e.g., finding the nearest gas station or all shopping centers within 5 miles) at any place, anytime. While this ubiquitous computing paradigm brings great convenience for information access, it raises a concern of potential intrusion of user's location privacy, which has hampered the widespread use of LBS. This proposed project attempts to support location-based data access with protection of location privacy. We propose a novel client-based framework for answering privacypreserving location-based queries based on a location cloaking technique. We identify the key issues arising in the proposed framework and study the location cloaking, query evaluation, and result refinement algorithms for various locationbased queries. Furthermore, we propose a privacy-preserving caching scheme that naturally fits into the proposed framework in order to improve data access efficiency. In contrast to conventional caching schemes that only cache a portion of dataset, the proposed caching scheme maintains a global view of the whole dataset, which facilitates local processing of location-based qeuries and achieves privacy protection. Various cache design issues including space management, replacement, and consistency will be investigated in this project.
[Relevant Publications]
* This project is supported by the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR, China under Project No. HKBU211206. For further information, please contact Jianliang Xu.