Defending Location Privacy Using Zero Knowledge Proof Concept in Location Based Services

The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of Location Based Services. For such applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are key issues. Over all privacy will have to be managed through a combination of technology, legislation, corporate policy, and social norms. There are many data privacy schemes including Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) those can be used for location privacy. ZKP is also useful for removing the bottleneck problem introduced by use of trusted third party. In the earlier work, authors proposed the concept of middleware architecture in which, request and response are not routed through middleware for every transaction. This has reduced the dependency on middleware. This paper presents correspondence between the authentication techniques used in above said architecture and zero knowledge proof technique. Use of the concept of zero knowledge proof for authentication and authorization in the domain of location based services is also explored.