Achieving privacy for continuous location based services in smart grid

Abstract

Recently, Location Based Services (LBS) is widely used in mobile technology. Location Based Services (LBS) is one of the new emerging mobile technologies in smart grid. In smart grid, however, the use of these technologies has resulted to new challenges. The privacy issues related with these services are becoming main concerns because of the leakage of user’s locations and query contents on smart meters. The most recent studies that have been done for privacy preserving solutions such as temporal and spatial cloaking based methods are not enough to protect user’s location privacy and hence hackers are hacking information, making changes to readings on smart meter too. This is because preserving privacy for LBS, is a very hard task. For instance, preserving privacy for a continuous query that is issued on road network environment and where location semantics are known well remains a serious challenge. Moreover, use of cloud computing result to very serious privacy leakages in this environment. The study designed a protocol and a Semantically-Aware Query Cloaking (SQC) in smart grid. To achieve this, the paper proposed to secure a real continuous query for location based services with queries that are semantically-aware. The authors bring in anonymity to hide the location of the smart grid and use homomorphism encryption mechanisms to secure services over the cloud. Finally, the study analyzed the security of the proposed algorithm and protocol.

Key Words: Location, based, Services, Anonymity, Privacy, Preservation, Dummy, Homomorphism, Cloud, Computing, Smart, Grid, Meter.