IDP: A privacy provisioning framework for TIP attributes in trusted third party-based location-based services systems

Abstract

Location-Based Services (LBS) System is rapidly growing due to radio communication services with wireless mobile devices having a positioning component in it. LBS System offers location-based services by knowing the actual user position. A mobile user uses LBS to access services relevant to their locations. In order to provide Point of Interest (POI), LBS confronts numerous privacy related challenges in three different formats including Non-Trusted Third Party (NTTP), Trusted Third Party (TTP), and Mobile Peer-to-Peer (P2P). The current study emphasized the TTP based LBS system where the Location server does not provide full privacy to mobile users. In TTP based LBS system, a user's privacy is concerned with personal identity, location information, and time information. In order to accomplish privacy under these concerns, state-of-the-art existing mechanisms have been reviewed. Hence, the aim to provide a promising roadmap to research and development communities for the right selection of privacy approach has achieved by conducting a comparative survey of the TTP based approaches. Leading to these privacy attributes, the current study addressed the privacy challenge by proposing a new privacy protection model named "Improved Dummy Position" (IDP) that protects TIP (Time, Identity, and Position) attributes under TTP LBS System. In order to validate the privacy level, a comparative analysis has been conducted by implementing the proposed IDP model in the simulation tool, Riverbed Modeler academic edition. The different scenarios of changing query transferring rate evaluate the performance of the proposed model. Simulation results demonstrate that our IDP could be considered as a promising model to protect user's TIP attributes in a TTP based LBS system due to better performance and improved privacy level. Further, the proposed model extensively compared with the existing work.