Homomorphic encryption to preserve location privacy

Abstract

Recently user privacy becomes an important security goal in most computer applications especially in context aware services. One of the most popular services in this field is location-based services (LBSs) that deliver the desired data based on the user's location. Although these services make the life easier, they lead to a privacy risk. To get the desired services, a user should disclose her location; so her location privacy is threatened. In this paper we consider a group of users who wants to use a location-based service while preserving their location privacy. We propose a solution for this scenario and compare it with the previous solution. Analysis of our protocol shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of computation and communication costs.