Privacy preservation in Location-Based Services (LBS) through Trusted Computing technology

Location privacy in Location Based Services (LBS) is the ability to protect the association between user´s identity, query sources, servers and database, thereby preventing an imminent attacker from easily linking users of LBS to certain locations. This paper studies recent schemes designed to offer location privacy and anonymity to LBS users. The main idea is to solve current practical problem by proposing a new framework of LBS Middleware called Trusted Anonymizer (TA) secured by Trusted Computing (TC) technologies. Firstly, we propose an architecture of Clustered Trusted Anonymizer (CTA) to mitigate bottlenecks as well as preventing TA from becoming a single point of failure. Secondly, we focus on a concrete efficient Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) scheme with the main functionalities adopted by TCG-compliant platforms in attestation environments. Each party involved in the LBS chain will be equipped with security platforms namely Trusted Platform Module (TPMs) and Mobile Trusted Module (MTMs). Hence, links and services form a trusted infrastructure for mobile and wireless networks.