Pseudo-Location Updating System for Privacy-Preserving Location-Based Services

With the rapid development of lo- cation-aware devices such as smart phones, Location-Based Services （LBSs） are becoming increasingly popular. Users can enjoy conven- ience by sending queries to LBS servers and obtaining service information that is nearby. However, these queries may leak the users＇ locations and interests to the un-trusted LBS servers, leading to serious privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Pseudo-Location Updating System （3PLUS） to achieve k-anonymity for mobile users using LBSs. In 3PLUS, without relying on a third party, each user keeps pseudo-locations ob- tained from both the history locations and the encountered users, and randomly exchanges one of them with others when encounters oc- cur. As a result, each user＇s buffer is disor- dered. A user can obtain any k locations from the buffer to achieve k-anonymity locally. The security analysis shows the security properties and our evaluation results indicate that the user＇s privacy is significantly improved.