A Forward Secure Framework for Private Information Retrieval Systems

Abstract

Abstract newlineIn the recent years with the expansion of smartphone and tablet markets, newlineLocation-Based Service (LBS) service offered to users who can access the newlineinformation with the help of mobile devices such as smartphones, pocket newlinepersonal computers, Global Positioning System (GPS) devices is becoming newlinemore and more popular. The major challenges in wide deployment newlineof LBS are technological challenges like positioning, tracking etc., awareness newlinelevels and pricing concerns, standardization/computing and battery newlinepower, data consistency and user experience and its inherent privacy and newlinesecurity issues. Users using LBS are not willing to reveal their identity newlineand location information to the server. The public location database resides newlineon an untrusted server and the query and response exchange between newlineusers and server take place over wireless media vulnerable to eavesdropping, newlinewhich compromises the privacy and security of the user. newlineAn efficient solution to the above-stated issues will help us to overcome newlinethe deployment barriers, increasing the number of users opting for LBS. newlineLiterature offers a variety of solutions to the privacy and security issues, newlinebut these solutions can not be directly applied to solve the privacy and newlinesecurity issues of the user s in LBS since these solutions are costly in terms newlineof communication and computation complexities in an LBS setting where newlineuser s mobile devices are resource-constrained. newlineForward security prevents the compromise of a long-term secret key from newlineaffecting the confidentiality of past conversations and private information newlineretrieval protocol allows a user to retrieve an item from a server in newlinepossession of a database without revealing which item is retrieved. This newlineresearch work aims to study, design and implement an efficient forward newlinesecure framework for private information retrieval to secure user privacy newlinein LBS. newlineiii newlineThis research work primarily deals with securing communication channel, newlinehiding location and user information from the untrusted location newlineserver and secure storage and retriev