A Road Truncation-Based Location Privacy-Preserving Method against Side-Weight Inference Attack

Taking advantage of precise positioning technology, location-based service (LBS) has brought a lot of convenience to people’s daily life and made the city smarter. However, the LBS applications also bring some challenges to personal location privacy protection. In order to obtain services from LBS providers, users have to upload their queries including sensitive information, such as identities and locations. This information may be leaked out by the LBS providers or even eavesdropped on by malicious adversaries, which may cause privacy leakage. To tackle this problem, many solutions have been investigated under the assumption that users are uniformly distributed. However, the users are not always uniformly distributed in real-world situations. For a side-weight inference attack, the adversary would infer that the target user is more likely to belong to the road section with more users, resulting in performance deterioration. In this paper, we investigate the issue of location privacy preservation against side-weight inference attack for non-uniform distributed road network. Meanwhile, we consider the cost function of LBS and formulate the object as a mixed integer programming problem. Then, we propose a road truncation-based scheme to protect location privacy. The road section with high user density is designed to be truncated. Finally, simulation results show that our scheme meets the demand for privacy protection at a low cost. As a result, our scheme is proven to protect users’ location privacy effectively and efficiently.