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ESOT: a new privacy model for preserving location privacy in Internet of Things

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Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) means connecting everything with every other thing through the Internet. In IoT, millions of devices communicate to exchange data and information with each other. During communication, security and privacy issues arise which need to be addressed. To protect information about users’ location, an efficient technique should be devised. Several techniques have already been proposed for preserving location privacy in IoT. However, the existing research lags in preserving location privacy in IoT and has highlighted several issues such as being specific or being restricted to a certain location. In this paper, we propose a new location privacy technique called the enhanced semantic obfuscation technique (ESOT) to preserve the location information of a user. Experimental results show that ESOT achieves improved location privacy and service utility when compared with a well-known existing approach, the semantic obfuscation technique.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering(Grant No. 61572231).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Ikram Ullah, Munam Ali Shah & Abdul Wahid

  2. Institute of Information Technology, Kohat Unversity of Science and Technology, Kohat, KP, Pakistan

    Amjad Mehmood

  3. Department of Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL, 32114, USA

    Houbing Song

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  1. Ikram Ullah
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Correspondence to Amjad Mehmood.

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Ullah, I., Shah, M.A., Wahid, A. et al. ESOT: a new privacy model for preserving location privacy in Internet of Things. Telecommun Syst 67, 553–575 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11235-017-0352-x

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