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A New Grid-Based Cloaking Algorithm for Privacy Protection in Location-Based Services

In Location-Based Services (LBSs), users send location-based queries to LBS servers along with their exact locations, but the location information of the users can be misused by adversaries. For this, a mechanism to deal with the users’ privacy protection is required. In this paper, we propose a new cloaking algorithm for privacy protection in LBSs. Our cloaking algorithm can support both k-anonymity and l-diversity. That is, it first creates a minimum cloaking region by finding l buildings (l-diversity) and then finds k users (k-anonymity). To generate the minimum cloaking region efficiently, we make use of a grid structure for storing buildings and users as well as a pruning technique for reducing unnecessary computation. Finally, we show from our performance analysis that our cloaking algorithm outperforms the existing grid-based cloaking algorithm, in terms of the size of cloaking regions, their creation time and query processing time based on them.