Privacy in Location Based Services: Protection Strategies, Attack Models and Open Challenges

The increasing capabilities of position determination technologies (e.g., GPS) in mobile and hand held device facilitates the widespread use of Location Based Services (LBS). Although LBSs are providing enhanced functionalities and convenience of ubiquitous computing, they open up new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to target violation of security and privacy of users. For these applications to perform, location of the individual/user is required. Consequently they may pose a major privacy threat on its users. So for LBS applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are key issues. “Privacy protection” has become the buzz word now days for the users of location based services. This problem has gained a considerable attention among the researcher community also. A state-of-art survey of privacy in location based services containing details of all privacy protection schemes is presented. Further, attack models and their handling mechanism are discussed in comprehensive manner. Finally, some open challenges in the area of location privacy are also demonstrated.