Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Nearest Life Services Search Based on Dummy Locations and Homomorphic Encryption Algorithm

With the rapid development of emerging internet technologies, Location Based Services (LBS) have brought great convenience to the people’s lives. However the locations will be exposed to service providers posing serious threats to users’ information security. No trusted entities except the user himself as a basic assumption, This paper proposes a privacy-preserving the nearest life services search scheme with cloud server instead of LBS provider, which the user and the life service providers both do not need to provide their actual locations to the cloud server. First, the user constructs a K-anonymous area composed of all dummy locations. The relevant life service providers respond according to the distance to the dummy address. Then, with the computing and communication assist of the cloud server which is based on homomorphic properties of Paillier cryptosystem, the user finds and connects to the nearest life service provider. Our scheme not only reduces the cost of communication between users and servers but also protects the location and track information, which achieves trade-off of privacy and availability in mobile web applications, it can also be used as a business model applicable to any location-based service industry.