Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
22
Privacy-enhanced Location-based Access
Control
C.A. Ardagna, M. Cremonini, S. De Capitani di Vimercati, P. Samarati
Dipartimento di Tecnologie dell'Informazione
Universita degli Studi di Milano
26013 Crema, Italy
{
ardagna,cremonini,decapita,samarati
}
@dti.unimi.it
Summary.
Advancements in location technologies reliability and precision are fos-
tering the development of location-based services that make use of the location
information of users. An increasingly important category of such services is repre-
sented by Location-based Access Control (LBAC) systems that integrate traditional
access control mechanisms with access conditions based on the physical position of
users and other attributes related to the users location. Since privacy is extremely
important for users, protection of their location information is paramount to the
success of such emerging location-based services.
In this chapter, we first present an overview of Location-based Access Control
systems and then characterize the location privacy protection problem. We then
discuss the main techniques that have been proposed to protect location information,
focusing on the obfuscation-based techniques. We conclude the chapter by showing a
privacy-aware LBAC architecture and describing how a location-based access control
policy can be evaluated.
1 Introduction
The widespread diffusion of pervasive technologies, as well as of mobile devices
relying on them, makes available a great amount of high-sensitive location in-
formation that can be used for a variety of purposes. Customer-oriented appli-
cations, social networks and monitoring services can be functionally enriched
with data reporting where people are, how they are moving or whether they
are close by specific locations. To this end, several commercial and enterprise-
oriented location-based services are already available and have gained popu-
larity. Location-based services are supported by modern location technologies
that have reached good precision and reliability at costs that most people
(e.g., the cost of mobile devices) and companies (e.g., the cost of integrating
location technologies in existing telecommunication infrastructures) can eco-
nomically sustain. Since these location-based services are very complex and
