A MOBILE USER LOCATION PRIVACY PROTECTION SCHEME BASED ON MULTI-LEVEL AUTHORIZATION

Aimed at the problem of user privacy leakage caused by the continuous collection of user location information by mobile applications, a multi-level authorization scheme to protect the location privacy of mobile users is proposed. The scheme achieved the privacy authorization grading for different mobile applications through PKI, and adopted an improved distributed location k-anonymity algorithm to achieve personalized location privacy protection for users. PKI added a privacy level to the certificate issued to mobile application and specified the user location accuracy information that the application could access. The distributed location k-anonymity algorithm was implemented on mobile terminals by combining the applied privacy level certificate and the user’s location privacy settings. The experimental results show that compared with the existing schemes, the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the communication cost and improve the security when protecting location privacy.