Strengths and Weaknesses of Location-Based Service Mechanisms

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Location-Based Service (LBS) is one of the most popular mobile services today, which offers wide range of services that are based on information about the physical location of a user or device. Typical LBS includes real-time turn-by-turn directions, find Points of Interest (POI) or social network services such as Facebook, Foursquare, Loopt, and Qype. However, user location privacy of is a major concern in today's mobile applications and there has been significant research dedicated to address this issue. Various location privacy preserving mechanisms (LPPMs) have been used to preserve the privacy of the location information of mobile users. This survey aims to present the privacy preserving mechanisms employed in the Location based services. Moreover, the LPPMs are classified into cryptographic and non-cryptographic mechanisms, and taxonomy of the mechanisms is also discussed. Furthermore, the classification and comparison of different mechanisms are presented based on the probability distribution attack. Also the strengths and weakness of different mechanisms are highlighted. The development of new technologies has deeply influenced the traditional mobile networks which uses user location information for data transmission. However, recently the user location information has been extensively employed for location-based-services (LBS). In mobile networks, privacy is the major concern as it doesn't have a clear line of protection. The location-based services refer to a wide range of services that are based on information about the physical location of a user or device. Typical LBS includes social networking services such as Facebook ~cite{Facebook:2014:fb} or Foursquare ~cite{Foursquare:2014:fs}, where the user shares his/her ... ... middle of paper ... .... Based on defense mechanism goals and attacker knowledge, the classification of the privacy preserving mechanisms used in location-based services will be presented in this section as shown in figure ef{fig:classification}. In summary, one problem with obfuscation mechanisms is that the effective size of the targeted obfuscation area can be minimized if an adversary applies some prior knowledge (map knowledge). The adversary can derive a probability distribution attack function of the user actual location over the obfuscation area. If the probability is not uniformly distributed (i.e., distribution being more concentrated around the user actual location), an adversary can easily find out the true location of user with high probability. Hence privacy is dependent on the adversary and neglecting adversary’s knowledge and capabilities limits the privacy protection.

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