k‐anonymity based location privacy protection method for location‐based services in Internet of Thing

Abstract The wide application of Internet of Things technology has promoted the application of location‐based services (LBS). Users can enjoy various conveniences brought by LBS. However, mobile users should submit their location information to LBS which may lead to privacy disclosure. Therefore, users need to protect their privacy while enjoying the service. If the privacy protection problem cannot be solved, the development of mobile internet business will be greatly affected. The existing location privacy protection methods take little account of real‐time road conditions and are unable to resist link attacks. In this article, a k ‐anonymous location privacy protection method based on Voronoi map was proposed. First, the Voronoi diagram was divided according to road network structure and real‐time road network data, and Voronoi unit was established with the intersection as the base point. Then, the base point is sent as an anchor instead of the user's actual location to the third‐party server. The Voronoi diagram generated by the k ‐anonymity constituted an anonymous space to resist multi‐query attacks and protected the location. k ‐1 user location points that are communicating were selected to form k ‐anonymous set with the current user, and send the anonymous set to LBS. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed method not only efficiently protected location privacy, but also provided high‐quality service.