Abstract
Location privacy is of utmost concern for location-based services. It is the property that a person’s location is revealed to other entities, such as a service provider or the person’s friends, only if this release is strictly necessary and authorized by the person. We study how to achieve location privacy for a service that alerts people of nearby friends. Here, location privacy guarantees that users of the service can learn a friend’s location if and only if the friend is actually nearby. We introduce three protocols—Louis, Lester and Pierre—that provide location privacy for such a service. The key advantage of our protocols is that they are distributed and do not require a separate service provider that is aware of people’s locations. The evaluation of our sample implementation demonstrates that the protocols are sufficiently fast to be practical.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Atallah, M.J., Du, W.: Secure Multi-party Computational Geometry. In: Dehne, F., Sack, J.-R., Tamassia, R. (eds.) WADS 2001. LNCS, vol. 2125, pp. 165–179. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Boneh, D., Goh, E.-J., Nissim, K.: Evaluating 2-DNF Formulas on Ciphertexts. In: Kilian, J. (ed.) TCC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3378, pp. 325–341. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Brandt, F.: Efficient Cryptographic Protocol Design based on Distributed El Gamal Encryption. In: Won, D.H., Kim, S. (eds.) ICISC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3935, pp. 32–47. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Cachin, C.: Efficient Private Bidding and Auctions with an Oblivious Third Party. In: Proceedings of 6th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 120–127. ACM Press, New York (1999)
Cheng, R., Zhang, Y., Bertino, E., Prabhakar, S.: Preserving User Location Privacy in Mobile Data Management Infrastructures. In: Danezis, G., Golle, P. (eds.) PET 2006. LNCS, vol. 4258, pp. 393–412. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Cramer, R., Gennaro, R., Schoenmakers, B.: A Secure and Optimally Efficient Multi-Authority Election Scheme. In: Fumy, W. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1997. LNCS, vol. 1233, pp. 103–118. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Dierks, T., Rescorla, E.: The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.1. RFC 4346 (April 2006), http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4346.txt
Du, W., Zhan, Z.: A Practical Approach to Solve Secure Multi-party Computation Protocols. In: Proceedings of 2002 Workshop on New Security Paradigms Workshop, pp. 127–135 (September 2002)
Gedik, B., Liu, L.: Location Privacy in Mobile Systems: A Personalized Anonymization Model. In: ICDCS 2005. Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (June 2005)
Gruteser, M., Grunwald, D.: Anonymous Usage of Location-Based Services Through Spatial and Temporal Cloaking. In: MobiSys 2003. Proceedings of First International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (May 2003)
Kocher, P.: Timing Attacks on Implementations of Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSS, and Other Systems. In: Koblitz, N. (ed.) CRYPTO 1996. LNCS, vol. 1109, pp. 104–113. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Køien, G.M., Oleshchuk, V.A.: Location Privacy for Cellular Systems; Analysis and Solutions. In: Danezis, G., Martin, D. (eds.) PET 2005. LNCS, vol. 3856, pp. 40–58. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Liskov, M., Silverman, R.: A Statistical Limited-Knowledge Proof for Secure RSA Keys. IEEE P1363 working group (1998)
Loopt, Inc.: loopt - Live In It. (Accessed February 2007), http://www.loopt.com/
MIT SENSEable City Lab: iFind (Accessed February 2007), http://ifind.mit.edu/
Mokbel, M.F., Chow, C.-Y., Aref, W.G.: The New Casper: Query Processing for Location Services without Compromising Privacy. In: Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2006), September 2006, pp. 763–774 (2006)
The OpenSSL Project. OpenSSL: The Open Source toolkit for SSL/TLS (Accessed February 2007), http://www.openssl.org/
Paillier, P.: Public-Key Cryptosystems Based on Composite Degree Residuosity Classes. In: Stern, J. (ed.) EUROCRYPT 1999. LNCS, vol. 1592, pp. 223–238. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Pollard, J.M.: Monte Carlo Methods for Index Computation (mod p). Mathematics of Computation 32(143), 918–924 (1978)
Shanks, D.: Class number, a theory of factorization, and genera. Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics 20, 415–440 (1971)
Shoup, V.: NTL: A Library for doing Number Theory (Accessed February 2007) http://www.shoup.net/ntl/
Yao, A.C.: Protocols for Secure Computations. In: Proceedings of 23rd IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 160–164. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (1982)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhong, G., Goldberg, I., Hengartner, U. (2007). Louis, Lester and Pierre: Three Protocols for Location Privacy. In: Borisov, N., Golle, P. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PET 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4776. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75551-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75551-7_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75550-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75551-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)