Mohammed Alzaabi, Chan Yeob Yeun, Thomas Anthony Martin, Journal of Information Processing Systems Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 121-136, Mar. 2011  

10.3745/JIPS.2011.7.1.121
Keywords: Location based services, Anonymity, Location Information
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Abstract

With the rapid growth of GPS-enable Smartphones, the interest on using Location Based Services (LBSs) has increased significantly. The evolution in the functionalities provided by those smartphones has enabled them to accurately pinpoint the location of a user. Because location information is what all LBSs depend on to process user¡¯s request, it should be properly protected from attackers or malicious service providers (SP). Additionally, maintaining user¡¯s privacy and confidentiality are imperative challenges to be overcome. A possible solution for these challenges is to provide user anonymity, which means to ensure that a user initiating a request to the SP should be indistinguishable from a group of people by any adversary who had access to the request. Most of the proposals that maintain user¡¯s anonymity are based on location obfuscation. It mainly focuses on adjusting the resolution of the user¡¯s location information. In this paper, we present a new protocol that is focused on using cryptographic techniques to provide anonymity for LBSs users in the smartphone environment. This protocol makes use of a trusted third party called the Anonymity Server (AS) that ensures anonymous communication between the user and the service provider.

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