With the advent of intelligent handheld devices, location sharing becomes one of the most popular services in mobile online social networks (mOSNs). In location-sharing services, users can enjoy a better social experience by updating their real-time location information. However, the leakage of private information may hinder the further development of location-sharing services. Although many solutions have been proposed to protect users’ privacy, the privacy-utility trade-offs must be considered. Therefore, we propose a new scheme called search efficient privacy-preserving location-sharing (SELS) system. In our scheme, we create a new approach named associated grids to improve the efficiency of location-sharing systems while maintaining users’ privacy. In addition, by setting the user-defined access control policy proposed in our scheme, users’ flexible privacy-preserving requirements can be satisfied. Detailed complexity and security analysis show that the proposed scheme is a practical and efficient privacy-preserving solution. Extensive simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness and performance of our scheme.
Towards Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing over Mobile Online Social Networks
