Abstract
Modern mobile phones and PDAs are equipped with positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS). Users can access public location-based services (e.g., Google Maps) and ask spatial queries. Although communication is encrypted, privacy and confidentiality remain major concerns, since the queries may disclose the location and identity of the user. Commonly, spatial \(\mathcal{K}\) -anonymity is employed to hide the query initiator among a group of \(\mathcal{K}\) users. However, existing work either fails to guarantee privacy, or exhibits unacceptably long response time.
In this paper we propose MobiHide, a Peer-to-Peer system for anonymous location-based queries, which addresses these problems. MobiHide employs the Hilbert space-filling curve to map the 2-D locations of mobile users to 1-D space. The transformed locations are indexed by a Chord-based distributed hash table, which is formed by the mobile devices. The resulting Peer-to-Peer system is used to anonymize a query by mapping it to a random group of \(\mathcal{K}\) users that are consecutive in the 1-D space. Compared to existing state-of-the-art, MobiHide does not provide theoretical anonymity guarantees for skewed query distributions. Nevertheless, it achieves strong anonymity in practice, and it eliminates system hotspots. Our experimental evaluation shows that MobiHide has good load balancing and fault tolerance properties, and is applicable to real-life scenarios with numerous mobile users.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This work has been partially supported by project PENED 03 funded by the European Social Fund (75%) and the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (25%).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
p2psim: The Peer-to-Peer Network Simulator, http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/p2psim.
Tor: Anonymity Online, http://tor.eff.org/
Brinkhoff, T.: A framework for generating network-based moving objects. Geoinformatica 6(2), 153–180 (2002)
Cheng, R., Zhang, Y., Bertino, E., Prabhakar, S.: Preserving User Location Privacy in Mobile Data Management Infrastructures. In: Proc. of Privacy Enhancing Technology Workshop (2006)
Chow, C.-Y., Mokbel, M.F., Liu, X.: A Peer-to-Peer Spatial Cloaking Algorithm for Anonymous Location-based Services. In: ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ACM Press, New York (2006)
Ganesan, P., Gummadi, K., Garcia-Molina, H.: Canon in G Major: Designing DHTs with Hierarchical Structure. In: Proc. of ICDCS, pp. 263–272 (2004)
Gedik, B., Liu, L.: Location Privacy in Mobile Systems: A Personalized Anonymization Model. In: Proc. of ICDCS, pp. 620–629 (2005)
Ghinita, G., Kalnis, P., Skiadopoulos, S.: PRIVE: Anonymous Location-Based Queries in Distributed Mobile Systems. In: Proc of WWW (2007)
Gruteser, M., Grunwald, D.: Anonymous Usage of Location-Based Services Through Spatial and Temporal Cloaking. In: Proc. of USENIX MobiSys (2003)
Hoh, B., Gruteser, M.: Protecting Location Privacy through Path Confusion. In: Proc. of SecureComm (2005)
Hu, H., Lee, D.L.: Range Nearest-Neighbor Query. IEEE TKDE 18(1), 78–91 (2006)
Kalnis, P., Ghinita, G., Mouratidis, K., Papadias, D.: Preserving Anonymity in Location Based Services. Technical Report TRB6/06, National University of Singapore (2006)
Kamat, P., Zhang, Y., Trappe, W., Ozturk, C.: Enhancing Source-Location Privacy in Sensor Network Routing. In: Proc. of ICDCS (2005)
Machanavajjhala, A., Gehrke, J., Kifer, D., Venkitasubramaniam, M.: l-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity. In: Proc. of ICDE (2006)
Mokbel, M.F., Chow, C.Y., Aref, W.G.: The New Casper: Query Processing for Location Services without Compromising Privacy. In: Proc. of VLDB (2006)
Moon, B., Jagadish, H.V., Faloutsos, C., Saltz, J.H.: Analysis of the Clustering Properties of the Hilbert Space-Filling Curve. IEEE TKDE 13(1), 124–141 (2001)
Samarati, P.: Protecting Respondents’ Identities in Microdata Release. IEEE TKDE 13(6), 1010–1027 (2001)
Samet, H.: The Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1990)
Stoica, I., Morris, R., Liben-Nowell, D., Karger, D.R., Kaashoek, M.F., Dabek, F., Balakrishnan, H.: Chord: a Scalable Peer-to-Peer Lookup Protocol for Internet Applications. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 11(1), 17–32 (2003)
Sweeney, L.: k-Anonymity: A Model for Protecting Privacy. Int. J. of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems 10(5), 557–570 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ghinita, G., Kalnis, P., Skiadopoulos, S. (2007). MobiHide: A Mobilea Peer-to-Peer System for Anonymous Location-Based Queries. In: Papadias, D., Zhang, D., Kollios, G. (eds) Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases. SSTD 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4605. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73540-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73540-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73539-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73540-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)