Secure protocol to protect location privacy in distance calculation
This addresses privacy threats in applications like epidemic contact tracing or restraining orders, though it is incremental as it builds on existing cryptographic methods.
The paper tackles the problem of computing distances between individuals without revealing their location data, using a secure protocol based on the ElGamal cryptosystem to preserve privacy, with analysis confirming no location information is disclosed.
Several applications require computing distances between different people. For example,this is required if we want to obtain the close contacts of people in case of and epidemic,or when restraining orders are imposed by a judge. However, periodically revealing location might pose a privacy threat to the involved parties. Continuous location data may be used to infer personal information about the owner, like behaviors, religious beliefs, buying habits, routines, etc. In this paper, we show that it is possible to calculate distance between two parties without disclosing their latitude and longitude data. For this purpose, we design a secure protocol based on the ElGamal cryptosystem and its homomorphic properties. The proposed protocol allows the calculation of distances while preserving location privacy. The protocol is analyzed in terms of security and performance. The security analysis shows that no involved party can learn any information about location.