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 gridbased cloaking algorithm, in terms of the size of cloaking regions, their creation time and query processing time based on them.