Sensitive and Neighborhood Privacy on Shortest Paths in the Cloud

Abstract

Efficient shortest path calculation has been studied extensively, in particular, in the distributed environment. However, preserving privacy in the cloud environment has just attracted latest attention. To preserve fixed-pattern one-neighborhood privacy in the cloud, current approach requires the calculation of all-pairs shortest paths in advance, which is time consuming for large graphs. In addition, specific paths that are sensitive and require hiding the source and destination vertices are not well addressed. In this work, we propose a new flexible k-neighborhood privacy-protection and efficient shortest distance computation scheme for sensitive shortest paths in the cloud environment. Combining the construction of k-skip shortest path sub-graphs, sensitive vertex adjustment, vertex hierarchy labeling and bottom-up partitioning techniques, the proposed approach not only subsumes one-neighborhood privacy but also provides efficient partitioning and query processing for sensitive shortest paths. Numerical experiments demonstrating the characteristics of proposed approach are presented.