DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

A Secure Location-based Alert System with Tunable Privacy-Performance Trade-off

04/20/2020
by   Gabriel Ghinita, et al.
University of Southern California
University of Massachusetts-Boston
0

Monitoring location updates from mobile users has important applications in many areas, ranging from public safety and national security to social networks and advertising. However, sensitive information can be derived from movement patterns, thus protecting the privacy of mobile users is a major concern. Users may only be willing to disclose their locations when some condition is met, for instance in proximity of a disaster area or an event of interest. Currently, such functionality can be achieved using searchable encryption. Such cryptographic primitives provide provable guarantees for privacy, and allow decryption only when the location satisfies some predicate. Nevertheless, they rely on expensive pairing-based cryptography (PBC), of which direct application to the domain of location updates leads to impractical solutions. We propose secure and efficient techniques for private processing of location updates that complement the use of PBC and lead to significant gains in performance by reducing the amount of required pairing operations. We implement two optimizations that further improve performance: materialization of results to expensive mathematical operations, and parallelization. We also propose an heuristic that brings down the computational overhead through enlarging an alert zone by a small factor (given as system parameter), therefore trading off a small and controlled amount of privacy for significant performance gains. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly improve performance compared to the baseline, and reduce the searchable encryption overhead to a level that is practical in a computing environment with reasonable resources, such as the cloud.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

01/16/2023

Supporting Secure Dynamic Alert Zones Using Searchable Encryption and Graph Embedding

Location-based alerts have gained increasing popularity in recent years,...
05/03/2021

An Efficient and Secure Location-based Alert Protocol using Searchable Encryption and Huffman Codes

Location data are widely used in mobile apps, ranging from location-base...
11/14/2017

Modeling and Performance Comparison of Privacy Approaches for Location Based Services

In pervasive computing environment, Location Based Services (LBSs) are g...
04/26/2018

NEXUS: Using Geo-fencing Services without revealing your Location

While becoming more and more present in our every day lives, services th...
01/03/2019

Please Forget Where I Was Last Summer: The Privacy Risks of Public Location (Meta)Data

The exposure of location data constitutes a significant privacy risk to ...
09/01/2019

A Privacy-Preserving, Accountable and Spam-Resilient Geo-Marketplace

Mobile devices with rich features can record videos, traffic parameters ...