NEXUS: Using Geo-fencing Services without revealing your Location

TL;DR

The paper introduces NEXUS, a homomorphic encryption-based protocol that enables geo-fencing services to operate without revealing users' exact locations, ensuring full location privacy while maintaining accurate geo-fencing results.

Contribution

NEXUS is the first protocol to provide provably full location privacy in geo-fencing applications using homomorphic encryption, without degrading service quality.

Findings

The protocol guarantees full location privacy with non-exposure of user data.

It produces exact geo-fencing results despite privacy-preserving measures.

The system fulfills all defined security properties for location privacy.

Abstract

While becoming more and more present in our every day lives, services that operate on users' locations or location trajectories suffer from general fear of misappropriation of the transmitted location data. Several works have investigated of how to cope with this drawback. Respective systems claim location-privacy, i.e. keeping users' locations secret, by employing anonymisation techniques concerning a user's identity, or by obfuscating the transmitted location. These approaches lead to a degrade of quality-of-service and can be vulnerable to de-anonymisation attacks, or allow to learn at least the approximate location of a user. Focusing on the application domain of geo-fencing, we present as remedy a protocol that is based on homomorphic encryption of a user's location. The protocol provably provides full location-privacy by non-exposure of the users' location data, while producing exact geo-fencing results. We provide a detailed definition of the protocol, show its applicability in an actual geo-fencing application, and show that the resulting system fulfills all security properties we see for a location-privacy preserving system.