Modeling location obfuscation for continuous query Saxena, Anuj S.; Bera, Debajyoti; Goyal, Vikram
Journal of information security and applications,
February 2019, 2019-02-00, Volume:
44
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
•We formalize local obfuscation mechanisms in the context of continuous query scenario and exemplify how some of the existing location obfuscations can be expressed using our formal model.•We define ...a probability based measure to quantify the privacy of obfuscation mechanisms.•We give a theoretical framework to analyze privacy enforcement techniques based on local obfuscation approaches.•We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework by analyzing a square-grid based location obfuscation mechanisms for continuous query scenario.
One of the major problems of location-based services is ensuring the location privacy of a mobile user. However, it becomes more challenging in the case of a continuously moving user. Though many techniques for preserving location privacy for continuous query scenario have been studied in the last decade, a formal approach for quantification of privacy and justification for the correctness of the privacy guarantee remains mostly at infancy level. In this paper, we present a theoretical model for location obfuscation that is flexible enough to express several obfuscation mechanisms and allow to reason about their privacy guarantees. We illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical model by analyzing a popular square grid-based obfuscation mechanism.