Enhancing privacy through caching in location-based services

Abstract

Privacy protection is critical for Location-Based Services (LBSs). In most previous solutions, users query service data from the untrusted LBS server when needed, and discard the data immediately after use. However, the data can be cached and reused to answer future queries. This prevents some queries from being sent to the LBS server and thus improves privacy. Although a few previous works recognize the usefulness of caching for better privacy, they use caching in a pretty straightforward way, and do not show the quantitative relation between caching and privacy. In this paper, we propose a caching-based solution to protect location privacy in LBSs, and rigorously explore how much caching can be used to improve privacy. Specifically, we propose an entropy-based privacy metric which for the first time incorporates the effect of caching on privacy. Then we design two novel caching-aware dummy selection algorithms which enhance location privacy through maximizing both the privacy of the current query and the dummies' contribution to cache. Evaluations show that our algorithms provide much better privacy than previous caching-oblivious and caching-aware solutions.