Privacy-Preserving Query Scheme (PPQS) for Location-Based Services in Outsourced Cloud

Pervasive smartphones boost the prosperity of location-based service (LBS) and the increasing data prompt LBS providers to outsource their LBS datasets to the cloud side. The privacy issues of LBS in the outsourced cloud scenario have attracted considerable interest recently. However, current schemes cannot provide sufficient privacy preservation against practical challenges and are little concerned about the data retrieval efficiency of the cloud side. Therefore, we present an efficient Privacy-Preserving LBS Query Scheme (i.e., PPQS ). In our scheme, two cloud entities are employed to store the sensitive information of the outsourced data and provide the query service, which enhances the ability of privacy preservation for sensitive information. Besides, by using the techniques of homomorphic encryption and searchable symmetric encryption, the proposed scheme supports both the type query and the range query, which can significantly improve the data retrieval efficiency of the cloud side and reduce the computation burden on the cloud side and the user side. Through detailed analysis on security and computation cost, we show the enhanced ability of privacy preservation and the lower computation cost compared to previous schemes. Based on a real dataset, extensive simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness and performance of our scheme.