Secure Location Sharing Services Using ORE for Social Networks

Abstract

A common functionality of many location-based social networking applications is a location sharing service that allows a group of friends to share their locations. With a potentially un-trusted server, such a location sharing service may threaten the privacy of users. Existing solutions for Privacy-Preserving Location Sharing Services (PPLSS) require a trusted third party that has access to the exact location of all users in the system or rely on expensive algorithms or protocols in terms of computational or communication overhead. Other solutions can only provide approximate query answers. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new encryption notion, called Order-Retrievable Encryption (ORE), for PPLSS for social networking applications. The distinguishing characteristics of our PPLSS are that it allows a group of friends to share their exact locations without the need of any third party or leaking any location information to any server or users outside the group, achieves low computational and communication cost by allowing users to receive the exact location of their friends without requiring any direct communication between users or multiple rounds of communication between a user and a server, provides efficient query processing by designing an index structure for our ORE scheme, supports dynamic location updates, and provides personalized privacy protection within a group of friends by specifying a maximum distance where a user is willing to be located by his/her friends. Experimental results show that the computational and communication cost of our PPLSS is much better than the state-of-the-art solution.