Title: A novel index retrieval and query optimisation method for private information retrieval in location-based service application

Authors: K.M. Mahesh Kumar; Radhakrishna Bhat; N.R. Sunitha

Addresses: Department of CSE, Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur, Karnataka, India; Affiliated to Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Manipal, Karnataka, India ' Department of CSE, Siddaganga Institute of Technology, Tumkur, Karnataka, India; Affiliated to Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi, India

Abstract: Location-based service is a popular information and communications technology. Security, trust and privacy are the major concerns preventing the wide deployment of LBS. In this paper, we address privacy issues by employing computational private information retrieval schemes and highlight a few optimisation methods. We propose a novel index retrieval technique which helps the user to identify his grid ID and know the index value for the point-of-interest (POI) type of his interest, and an adaptive computation method (flip-optimisation) to reduce multiplication cost for PIR query used to retrieve the POI item at the specified index. The adaptive computation method proposed in this paper is generic and can be applied to any application which uses PIR protocol to access data privately. Our work empirically evaluated the proposed method by implementing the PIR prototype and found it suitable for a practical purpose.

Keywords: index retrieval; location-based service; LBS; location privacy; private information retrieval; PIR; quadratic residuosity assumption; QRA; query optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2021.118550

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2021 Vol.14 No.4, pp.379 - 402

Received: 13 Oct 2020
Accepted: 16 Dec 2020
Published online: 28 Oct 2021 *

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