Secure spatial Top-k query processing via untrusted location based services accessing outsourced databases

This paper considers a novel distributed system for collaborative location-based information generation and sharing which become increasingly popular due to the explosive growth of Internet-capable and location-aware mobile devices. The system consists of a data collector, data contributors, location-based service providers (LBSPs), and system users. The data collector gathers reviews about points-of-interest (POIs) from data contributors, while LBSPs purchase POI data sets from the data collector and allow users to perform spatial top-k queries which ask for the POIs in a certain region and with the highest k ratings for an interested POI attribute. In practice, LBSPs are untrusted and may return fake query results for various bad motives, e.g., in favor of POIs willing to pay. This paper presents three novel schemes for users to detect fake spatial snapshot and moving top-k query results as an effort to foster the practical deployment and use of the proposed system. The efficacy and efficiency of our schemes are thoroughly analyzed and evaluated.

SummaryIn recent times, many location‐based service providers (LBSPs) choose to outsource data query services to third‐party cloud service providers (CSPs). This allows users to easily search for points of interests (POIs), such as restaurants and parking lots in their vicinity, using their mobile devices and in‐vehicle infotainment units. Skyline query is one potential technique to be deployed for road networks. However, the untrusted CSPs may forge or omit query results, intentionally or not. Therefore, in this article, we posit that by observing the unique properties of skyline query results in road networks, we can bind each POI with four nearby POIs with special properties using signature chain technology. Our proposed approach not only provides users with skyline query result authentication ability over the road network, but also have low communication overhead. Specifically, the overhead analysis and experimental results show that our proposed approach decreases the communication overhead.

The emerging new services for GPS and mobile users have developed applications that access and exploit spatial objects with new components (e.g. text and social network). Web objects, including blogs, tweets, photos and videos, are embedded into a map by the APIs of map service providers, where textual messages are associated with geographic information. Location-based social networking services, arising from Facebook and Foursquare, allow users to browse and share their traces of locations among the social networks. Among this class of applications, the highlight is that the retrieved spatial objects (e.g. points of interest and moving users) are featured with new components. Integrating such new components into the spatial query processing has produced large amounts of promising results. However, handling new components along with the retrieval of spatial objects increases the complexity of such joint query processing significantly. Thus, management over data from such multiple domains has been received considerable attention from database research community.\n\nIn this thesis, we introduce three interesting problems and study their sophisticated solutions for processing spatial objects with new components: (i) category-aware optimal route query (CORQ), (ii) social and spatial ranking query (SSRQ), and (iii) efficient notification of meeting point (ENMP) query. Our results for (i) and (ii) facilitate the retrieval of spatial objects from multiple domains while our solutions for (iii) provide effective tools for synchronous management of multiple moving users from a social network. Category-aware optimal route queries (CORQ) are generalized from the traveling salesman problem and enable users to retrieve shortest routes covering selected categories. Social and spatial ranking queries (SSRQ) are relevant to spatial object recommendations using social information and allow users to obtain the spatial objects that not only are near their locations but also impress them with high social influence. Efficient notification of meeting point (ENMP) queries are variants of aggregate nearest neighbor queries and provide real-time rearrangement for multiple moving users according to their locations.\n\nQuery processing in such multiple domains is complicated due to the mixture of domain information and their integration within one search. Naïve algorithms for these problems incur either numerous expensive evaluations or massive communication cost, which render them inapplicable to large datasets. Our main research purpose is to design efficient and effective solutions for the proposed problems, that avoid the aforementioned shortcomings of naïve algorithms.

Location-based services (LBSs) typically crowdsource geo-tagged data from mobile users. Collecting more data will generally improve the utility for LBS providers; however, it also leads to more privacy exposure of users’ mobility patterns. Although the tension between data utility and user privacy has been recognized, there lacks a solution that determines how much data to collect—in both spatial and temporal domains—is the “best” for both mobile users and the service provider. This article proposes a strategy toward making an optimal tradeoff such that a user submits data only if her mobility privacy will not be compromised and the data utility of the LBS provider will be sufficiently improved. To this end, we first define and formulate a concept called privacy exposure , which incorporates both the spatial distribution and the temporal transition of a user’s activity points . Second, we define and quantify data utility in terms of spatial repetitions and temporal closeness among data based on an economic principle. Then, we propose a PRivacy-preserving and UTility-Enhancing Crowdsourcing (PRUTEC) algorithm to determine, on behalf of each mobile user, whether a newly sensed piece of data should be submitted to the LBS provider. Our simulation demonstrates that PRUTEC improves the data utility of the service provider with a much less amount of data to collect and reduces privacy exposure for mobile users while collecting useful data continuously.

With the pervasiveness of location-aware mobile electronic devices and the advances of wireless communications, location-based services (LBS), which can help people enjoy a convenient life, has attracted considerable interest recently. However, the privacy issues of LBS are still challenging today. Aiming at the challenges, in this paper, we present a new efficient and privacy-preserving LBS query scheme in outsourced cloud, i.e., EPQ, for pervasive smartphones. In the EPQ scheme, the LBS provider's data are first outsourced to the cloud server in an encrypted manner, and then, a registered user can get accurate LBS query results without divulging his/her location information to the LBS provider and the cloud server. Specifically, based on an improved homomorphic encryption technique over a composite order group, a special spatial range query algorithm SRQC over ciphertext is proposed, with which EPQ achieves privacy preservation of user's query and confidentiality of LBS data in the outsourced cloud server. Through detailed security analysis, we show that EPQ can resist various known security threats. In addition, we also implement EPQ over a smartphone and three workstations with a real LBS data set, and extensive simulation results further demonstrate that the proposed EPQ scheme is highly efficient at the smartphone side and can be implemented effectively in the cloud server.

POIs (points of interest) as well as users’ check-in information and their ratings on POIs have been widely studies in systems providing location-based services. We note that users usually have their own preferences for POI categories and their own network of friends. Therefore, we aim to provide for a group of users a new kind of POI-finding query that considers not only POI preferences of each user but also other aspects of location-based social networks such as users’ locations and POI ratings. We name such a new query as Spatial Group Preference (SGP) query. For a group of users, an SGP query returns top-k POIs that are much likely to satisfy the needs of users. Specially, we propose a new evaluation model that considers user preferences for user preferences for POI categories. Based on this model, we develop basic algorithms based on R-tree to evaluate SGP queries. Further, we design a new index structure called CR-tree to accelerate the query performance. We prove that CR-tree has better pruning efficiency than the traditional R-tree. We conduct experiments on a simulation dataset as well as two real datasets with respect to various configurations. The results suggest the efficiency of our proposal.

Most of the mobile phones have GPS sensors which make location based service (LBS) applicable. LBS brings not only convenience but also location privacy leak to us. Achieving anonymity and sending private queries are two main privacy-preserving courses in LBS. A novel location privacy-preserving method is proposed based on Voronoi graph partition on road networks. Firstly, based on the prediction of a user's moving direction, a cooperative k-anonymity method is proposed without constructing cloaking regions which may lead to efficiency decline in continuous query. And then, a query algorithm is proposed without providing any user's actual location, replaced by continuous anchor sequence, to LBS provider. This algorithm can work out precise results according to candidate sets returned by LBS provider and it also solves uneven distribution problem in SpaceTwist. Performance analysis and experiments show that our method achieves a preferable tradeoff between QoS and location privacy preserving; it has obvious advantages compared with other methods.

Location-based services greatly enrich our mobility experiences; it also comes along with privacy concerns, as a location-based service provider can now continuously track the location of a user. Although many privacy protocols have been proposed to address the privacy issues, there has not been much comprehensive study and comparison of those protocols.

Mobility patterns of vehicles and people provide powerful data sources for location-based services such as fleet optimization and traffic flow analysis. Location-based service providers must balance the value they extract from trajectory data with protecting the privacy of the individuals behind those trajectories. Reaching this goal requires measuring accurately the values of utility and privacy. Current measurement approaches assume adversaries with perfect knowledge, thus overestimate the privacy risk. To address this issue, we introduce a model of an adversary with imperfect knowledge about the target. The model is based on equivalence areas, spatio-temporal regions with a semantic meaning, e.g. the target’s home, whose size and accuracy determine the skill of the adversary. We then derive the standard privacy metrics of k-anonymity, l-diversity and t-closeness from the definition of equivalence areas. These metrics can be computed on any dataset, irrespective of whether and what kind of anonymization has been applied to it. This work is of high relevance to all service providers acting as processors of trajectory data who want to manage privacy risks and optimize the privacy vs. utility trade-off of their services.

Shortest path queries on road networks are widely used in location-based services (LBS), e.g., finding the shortest route from my home to the airport through Google Maps. However, when there are a large number of path queries arrived concurrently or in a short while, an LBS provider (e.g., Google Maps) has to endure a high workload and then may lead to a long response time to users. Therefore, path caching services are utilized to accelerate large-scale path query processing, which try to store the historical path results and reuse them to answer the coming queries directly. However, most of existing path caches are organized based on nodes of paths; hence, the underlying road network topology is still needed to answer a path query when its querying origin or destination lies on edges. To overcome this limitation, we propose an edge-based shortest path cache in this paper that can efficiently handle queries without needing any road information, which is much more practical in the real world. We achieve this by designing a totally new edge-based path cache structure, an efficient R-tree-based cache lookup algorithm, and a greedy-based cache construction algorithm. Extensive experiments on a real road network and real point-of-interest datasets are conducted, and the results show the efficiency, scalability, and applicability of our proposed caching techniques.

Location-based services are becoming popular for mobile users. The mobile users' location plays a key role to provide the service from one side, but it can be considered as a dimension of their privacy and so necessary to keep it anonymous to the other parties. Since one important issue is to achieve an accurate service, it is important to use the mobile's accurate location. Using the location accurately raises some concerns on behalf of the user's privacy. One solution for meeting this requirement is using tickets by the means of a third party. The tickets should have some properties for not letting a mobile user to cheat and use the ticket more than one time. This paper proposes a protocol to preserve Preserve Privacy in Location based services, in short 2PLoc, aimed to provide anonymity of location, for location based services, based on onetime tickets regardless of the existence of any trusted third party. The protocol satisfies the requirement of accurate location use, as well as the ability of revoking anonymity on the ticket double spending. The user, location-based service provider, and the ticket issuer are the three untrusted parties in 2PLoc. 2PLoc is based on a special designed ticket that disconnects the relation between the location of the mobile user and its identity. The ticket is designed based on the blind signature and the concept of elliptic curves discrete logarithm.

Providing top-k query services is relevant for storage servers which collect valuable files/data and process queries for data owners and mobile users. However, this kind of service could incur severe security concerns, because hackers or even the managers/administrators of the servers may steal important data sets and deceive users into responding to forged or incomplete query results. Therefore, these data sets need to be preserved in privacy, and moreover, the users should have the capability to verify the authenticity and integrity of the query results. As users will demand distinct information with various preferences and time domains in the pragmatic world, the traditional top-k queries are insufficient to satisfy their demands. To solve the problem, we provide the functional top-k queries in multi-dimensional space, such that the users can launch queries on the conjunction and sum of the dimensions/attributes. Some recent works have studied how to preserve data privacy and/or integrity for top-k queries on data storage applications. However, these prior works are limited to traditional top-k queries in preserving data privacy and/or integrity without permitting to systematically process top-k queries over encrypted domain in multi-dimensional space and without providing an efficiently verifiable mechanism for the corresponding query results. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective method, called SFTopk, which addresses more challenging security problems in data privacy and verifiable functional top-k queries in multi-dimensional space. From performance evaluation experiments, it is shown that our proposed method is much more efficient than the prior works in terms of communication overhead and computation cost.

Current research in location-based services (LBSs) highlights the importance of cryptographic primitives in privacy preservation for LBSs, and presents solutions that attempt to support the (apparently) mutually exclusive requirements for access control and context privacy (i.e., identity and/or location), while at the same time adopting more conservative assumptions in order to reduce or completely remove the need for trust on system entities (e.g., the LBS provider, the network operator, or other peer nodes). This paper surveys the current state of knowledge concerning the use of cryptographic primitives for privacy-preservation in LBS applications.

A vehicle in road networks shares location data with other vehicles and location-based services (LBS) through Internet-of-vehicles (IoV). By analyzing the location data from vehicles, LBS providers can offer vehicles better services. However, fake trajectories created by adversaries and malicious drivers diminish the location data utility in IoV and breach the quality of LBS. Illegal trajectory detection is vital to ensure location data utility in IoV. Existing location privacy-preserving schemes like obfuscation schemes add noise to actual location data increasing difficulties in detecting illegal trajectories. In this paper, we detect illegal trajectory in the case that all drivers in road networks protect location privacy by using obfuscation. We propose a new personalized obfuscation mechanism to dynamically and adaptively protect the location privacy of drivers in road networks. Considering uneven protection, we propose a trajectory detection scheme to classify trajectories in IoV. We evaluate our detection method with the data of real-world road networks, which is an important scenario of smart cities. The experiment results show that the proposed classifier outperforms existing studies in detecting malicious obfuscated trajectories with at least 94% of the Area Under the Curve (AUC) score.

In the Internet of thing (IoT), with the geographic location of geospatial sensor data and the global positioning systems, location-based services (LBSs) can provide powerful location-aware IoT applications for mobile clients according to their current locations. For LBSs, a k-nearest neighbor (kNN) search can provide a mobile client with geospatial sensor data of k-nearest spatial points of interest (POIs) according to its current location. In this paper, we propose a spatial air index with neighbor information to organize IoT geospatial sensor data for processing kNN searches in the wireless broadcast systems. Since the answered POIs may be neighbors of each other, we add neighbor information to the index structure, which is interleaved with geospatial sensor data, to speed up the query processing. To avoid unnecessary examination of geospatial sensor data from the wireless channel, the proposed method provides the centroid of geospatial data and the corresponding longest distance between the centroid and geospatial data in the region. With this information, the query processing of a kNN search can quickly determine whether to skip examining this region, saving energy consumption of the mobile device. Performance evaluations have verified that the proposed method outperforms the distributed spatial index.