Enabling Location Privacy and Resisting Colluding Attacks in Location Based Services for Mobile Applications

Location Based Services (LBS) are becoming more conventional now-a-days. Apart from benefits from these LBS, there are many privacy threats.These applications cannot rely independently on the users’ devices to discover and transmit location information because users have an incentive to cheat. Instead, such applications require their users to prove their locations. Unfortunately, today’s mobile users lack a mechanism to prove their current or past locations. This paper presents Location Privacy - the ability to control the access of location information related to an individual. Location proofs are handed out by the wireless infrastructure (e.g., a Wi-Fi access point or a cell tower) to mobile devices. The relatively short range of the wireless radios ensures that these devices are in physical proximity to the wireless transmitter. As a result, these devices are capable of proving their current or past locations to mobile applications. In order to defend against colluding attacks, we also present betweenness ranking-based approach for outlier detection.