Title: Privacy-enhanced distance computation with applications

Authors: Xiaojuan Chen; Yi Mu; Xiaofen Wang; Runhua Shi

Addresses: Department of Information Management, Rongchang Campus, Southwest University, Chongqing, China ' Centre for Computer and Information Security Research, School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei City, China

Abstract: Location privacy has been regarded as an important requirement for location-based service on mobile devices such as mobile phones, where location information might have to be protected against unauthorised or even authorised (curious-but-honest) parties in some cases. We propose a scheme, which provides a method for a location server to identify the nearest mobile object (amongst n mobile objects) to a target mobile object without revealing the location of any participant to the location server. We describe our protocol by using a practical application, where the aim is to identify a closest service vehicle among registered service vehicles to the target car which requires a service, while the locations of all participants are protected against the location server. Our scheme only requires an additive homomorphic encryption scheme without the need of fully homomorphic encryption as required by all other related schemes on location privacy.

Keywords: location privacy; mobile security; confidentiality; privacy protection; privacy preservation; distance computation; location-based services; LBS; mobile devices; mobile phones; cell phones; additive homomorphic encryption; cryptography.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2016.077448

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2016 Vol.8 No.3, pp.234 - 249

Received: 03 Nov 2015
Accepted: 02 Feb 2016
Published online: 30 Jun 2016 *

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