Protecting Movement Trajectories Through Fragmentation

Location-based applications (LBAs) like geo-social networks, points of interest finders, and real-time traffic monitoring applications have entered people’s daily life. Advanced LBAs rely on location services (LSs) managing movement trajectories of multiple users in a scalable fashion. However, exposing trajectory information raises user privacy concerns, in particular if LSs are non-trusted. For instance, an attacker compromising an LS can use the retrieved user trajectory for stalking, mugging, or to trace user movement. To limit the misuse of trajectory data, we present a new approach for the secure management of trajectories on non-trusted servers. Instead of providing the complete trajectory of a user to a single LS, we split up the trajectory into a set of fragments and distribute the fragments among LSs of providers. By distributing fragments, we avoid a single point of failure in case of compromised LSs, while different LBAs can still reconstruct the trajectory based on user-defined access rights.