Benfei Duan

Shun Zhang, Pengfei Lan, Benfei Duan et al.

The popularity of cyber-physical systems is fueling the rapid growth of location-based services. This poses the risk of location privacy disclosure. Effective privacy preservation is foremost for various mobile applications. Recently, geo-indistinguishability and expected inference error are proposed for limiting location leakages. In this paper, we argue that personalization means regionalization for geo-indistinguishability, and we propose a regionalized location obfuscation mechanism called DPIVE with personalized utility sensitivities. This substantially corrects the differential and distortion privacy problem of PIVE framework proposed by Yu et al. on NDSS 2017. We develop DPIVE with two phases. In Phase I, we determine disjoint sets by partitioning all possible positions such that different locations in the same set share the Protection Location Set (PLS). In Phase II, we construct a probability distribution matrix in which the rows corresponding to the same PLS have their own sensitivity of utility (PLS diameter). Moreover, by designing QK-means algorithm for more search space in 2-D space, we improve DPIVE with refined location partition and present fine-grained personalization, enabling each location to have its own privacy level endowed with a customized privacy budget. Experiments with two public datasets demonstrate that our mechanisms have the superior performance, typically on skewed locations.

Zhang Shun, Duan Benfei, Chen Zhili et al.

Geo-indistinguishability and expected inference error are two complementary notions for location privacy. The joint guarantee of differential privacy (indistinguishability) and distortion privacy (inference error) limits the information leakage. In this paper, we analyze the differential privacy of PIVE, a dynamic location obfuscation mechanism proposed by Yu, Liu and Pu (NDSS 2017), and show that PIVE fails to offer either of the privacy guarantees on adaptive Protection Location Sets (PLSs) as claimed. Specifically, we demonstrate that different PLSs could intersect with one another due to the defined search algorithm, and then different apriori locations in the same PLS could have different protection diameters. As a result, we can show that the proof of local differential privacy for PIVE is problematic. Besides, the condition introduced in PIVE is confirmed to be not sufficient for bounding expected inference errors in general, which makes the user-defined inference error threshold invalid. To address these issues, we propose a couple of correction approaches, analyze theoretically their satisfied privacy characteristics and detail their respective merits and demerits.

Shun Zhang, Benfei Duan, Zhili Chen et al.

Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) is an increasing popular category of crowdsourcing in the era of mobile Internet and sharing economy. It requires workers to arrive at a particular location for task fulfillment. Effective protection of location privacy is essential for workers' enthusiasm and valid task assignment. However, existing SC models with differential privacy usually perturb real-time location data for both partition and data publication. Such a way may produce large perturbations to counting queries that affect assignment success rate and allocation accuracy. This paper proposes a framework (R-HT) for protecting location privacy of workers taking advantage of both real-time and historical data. We simulate locations by sampling the probability distribution learned from historical data, use them for grid partition, and then publish real-time data under this partitioning with differential privacy. This realizes that most privacy budget is allocated to the worker count of each cell and yields an improved Private Spatial Decomposition approach. Moreover, we introduce some strategies for geocast region construction, including quality scoring function and local maximum geocast radius. A series of experimental results on real-world datasets shows that R-HT attains a stable success rate of task assignment, saves performance overhead and fits for dynamic assignment on crowdsourcing platforms.