Abstract
Compared with traditional online social networks (OSNs), mobile OSNs (mOSNs) take a step further in that they provide the location-based services, and location-sharing is a fundamental component of mOSN. However, without privacy protection, users may be hesitant to share their locations. In this paper, we present a new privacy-preserving location-sharing system for mOSN, which is flexible to support a variety of location-based applications, in that it enables location-sharing between both trusted social relations and untrusted strangers. It allows user to dynamically change his sharing decryption key when to add or revoke a friend. We further propose a security improved system, which can be secure against neighborhood attacks. In our proposed systems, threat models are further analysed and users’ location privacy is proved secure. Implementation and evaluation show that they are efficient and practical.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of China (No. 2013CB834204), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61272423, 61100224, 61272455 and 61300241), National Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin (Nos. 12JCYBJC10100 and 13JCQNJC00300), Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (No. 20120031120036), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. S2013010013671), the Guangzhou Zhujiang Science and Technology Future Fellow Fund (Grant No.2012J2200094), Distinguished Young Scholars Fund of Department of Education (No. Yq2013126), Guangdong Province, China 111 Project (No. B08038), Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China (No. 20130203110004), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (No. NCET-13-0946), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (BDY15).