Preserving user anonymity in context-aware location-based services: A proposed framework

Protecting privacy is an important goal in designing location-based services. Service providers want to verify legitimate users and allow permitted users to enjoy their services. Users, however, want to preserve their privacy and prevent tracking. In this paper, a new framework providing users with more privacy and anonymity in both the authentication process and the querying process is proposed. Unlike the designs proposed in previous works, our framework benefits from a combination of three important techniques: k-anonymity, timed fuzzy logic, and a one-way hash function. Modifying and adapting these existing schemes provides us with a simpler, less complex, yet more mature solution. During authentication, the oneway hash function provides users with more privacy by using fingerprints of users' identities. To provide anonymous authentication, the concept of confidence level is adopted with timed fuzzy logic. Regarding location privacy, spatial k-anonymity prevents the users' locations from being tracked. The experiment results and analysis show that our framework can strengthen the protection of anonymity and privacy of users by incurring a minimal implementation cost and can improve functionality.