Fog-Assisted Privacy Preservation Scheme for Location-Based Services Based on Trust Relationship

With advancements in smart mobile devices and their capabilities, location-based services have gained utmost importance, as its individual and social benefits are enormous. Users of location-based services have a concern to the security issues posed by its usage as the location service providers track the users' interests, behavior, and identity information. Most of the location-based services are launched from mobile phones that have stringent resources; hence incorporating encryption schemes becomes tedious, and further, dual identity attacks uncover the encrypted message. A fog-assisted privacy protection scheme for location-based service (FPriLBS) employs a semi-trusted third party as a fog server to eliminate redundant queries submitted to the location service provider in addition to the trusted helper selection scheme which hides the real identity of the user from the fog server. The experimental results show that the proposed FPriLBS outperforms the existing schemes in terms of processing time and processing cost.