Privacy Protection in Participatory Sensing Applications Requiring Fine-Grained Locations

Abstract

The emerging participatory sensing applications have brought a privacy risk where users expose their location information. Most of the existing solutions preserve location privacy by generalizing a precise user location to a coarse-grained location, and hence they cannot be applied in those applications requiring fine-grained location information. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a novel method to preserve location privacy by anonymizing coarse-grained locations and retaining fine-grained locations using Attribute Based Encryption (ABE). In addition, we do not assume the service provider is an trustworthy entity, making our solution more feasible to practical applications. We present and analyze our security model, and evaluate the performance and scalability of our system.