A Unified Framework for Authenticating Privacy Preserving Location Based Services

An important class of location-based services (LBSs) is information queries that provide users with location information of nearby point of interests such as a restaurant, a hospital or a gas station. To access an LBS, a user has to reveal her location to the location-based service provider (LSP). From the revealed location, the LSP can infer private information about the user's health, habit and preferences. Thus, along with the benefits, LBSs also bring privacy concern to the users. Hence, protecting the privacy of LBSs users is a major challenge. Another major challenge is to ensure the reliability and correctness of the provided LBSs by the LSP, which is known as authentication. We develop a novel authentication technique that supports variants of privacy preserving LBSs with less storage and communication overhead. More importantly, we present a unified framework that can handle authentication for a wide range of privacy preserving location-based queries, range, nearest neighbor, and group nearest neighbor queries. We conduct experiments to show the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in comparison with the state-of-art techniques.