Spatial Cloaking Method Based on Reciprocity Property for Users' Privacy in Road Networks

The proliferation of position identifying devices becomes increasing privacy threat in location-based services (LBSs). It is necessary to tackle the privacy threat of a user in processing his/her request because the user has to submit his/her exact location with a query to the LBS. In road networks, X-Star provides a star-graph based cloaking method that can protect a user's privacy from attack resilience as well as optimize a query processing cost. However, it incurs a low anonymization success rate and a high computation overhead. We propose the Hilbert-order based cloaking algorithm to resolve the problems. Our algorithm guarantees K-anonymity under the strict reciprocity condition and increases anonymization success rate by reducing computation overhead. Experimental evaluations show the effectiveness of our method in the field of spatial cloaking.