An Efficient and Secure Location-based Alert Protocol using Searchable Encryption and Huffman Codes
Sina Shaham, Gabriel Ghinita, Cyrus Shahabi

TL;DR
This paper introduces a secure location-based alert protocol that leverages searchable encryption and Huffman coding to enhance privacy and significantly improve performance in proximity detection applications.
Contribution
The paper proposes a novel variable-length location encoding method using Huffman codes to optimize searchable encryption performance in location-based alert systems.
Findings
Huffman coding reduces encoding length variability.
Performance improvements are substantial over fixed-length encoding.
Theoretical analysis confirms efficiency gains.
Abstract
Location data are widely used in mobile apps, ranging from location-based recommendations, to social media and navigation. A specific type of interaction is that of location-based alerts, where mobile users subscribe to a service provider (SP) in order to be notified when a certain event occurs nearby. Consider, for instance, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, where contact tracing has been singled out as an effective means to control the virus spread. Users wish to be notified if they came in proximity to an infected individual. However, serious privacy concerns arise if the users share their location history with the SP in plaintext. To address privacy, recent work proposed several protocols that can securely implement location-based alerts. The users upload their encrypted locations to the SP, and the evaluation of location predicates is done directly on ciphertexts. When a certain…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPrivacy-Preserving Technologies in Data · Indoor and Outdoor Localization Technologies · Wireless Communication Security Techniques
