Aggregating geospatial data plays a crucial role in location-based services. However, collecting such sensitive data raises concerns about location privacy leakage. Local Differential Privacy (LDP), as a de facto privacy paradigm, has been widely employed to ensure individual location privacy. Nonetheless, existing approaches for aggregating geospatial data under LDP either suffer from compromised accuracy or involve complex computations. In this work, we propose a history-aware geospatial data aggregation framework to enhance both accuracy and efficiency while guaranteeing LDP. To this end, we first investigate an efficient aggregation method, namely General Randomized Response (GRR), and find that its variance of aggregation error follows the sum of two zero-mean binomial distributions. This reveals that multiple aggregations can boost the accuracy of GRR. To obtain multiple aggregations without compromising privacy, we adopt a Markov transition model to complement current aggregations from historical ones. However, learning the Markov transition matrix on perturbed data is challenging. Accordingly, we propose a privacy-aware Markov Transition Matrix Estimation (MTME) algorithm. Finally, we introduce a truth discovery-based refinement algorithm to iteratively derive an accurate aggregated result from multiple inaccurate aggregations. We evaluate our proposed method on two real-world trajectory datasets, and thorough experiments demonstrate its superior accuracy and very low time overhead compared to competitors.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled mobile-edge computing (MEC) is expected to provide low-latency, ultrareliable, and highly robust network services to improve user service experience. In this article, the UAV deployment, task offloading, and resource allocation problem is investigated in a multi-UAV-enabled MEC system with task-intensive region. UAVs as edge servers to provide computing services for ground terminal devices (TDs). The time-sensitive tasks of TDs can be computed locally or offloaded to UAVs. The goal is to improve the utility of tasks, i.e., maximize the number of tasks offloaded to UAVs under conditions of ensuring a desired task computed success rate and satisfying the energy and latency constraints. The jointly optimizing problem of the 3-D deployment, elevation angle, computational resource allocation of the UAV, and task offloading decision is formulated. To this end, a two-layer optimization approach is proposed to solve the formulated problem. Specifically, the upper layer decides the UAV position, elevation angle, and transmission power of TDs based on the actual ground situation. The lower layer determines the computational resource allocation of UAVs and the task offloading decision based on the optimized results derived from the upper layer. Through the two-layer joint optimization, our goal is finally achieved. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm effectively improves the number of tasks offloaded to UAVs and the task completion rate simultaneously with the flexible UAV deployment and well-designed task offloading strategy.

Password, fingerprint and face recognition are the most popular authentication schemes on smartphones. However, these user authentication schemes are threatened by shoulder surfing attacks and spoof attacks. In response to these challenges, eye movements have been utilized to secure user authentication since their concealment and dynamics can reduce the risk of suffering those attacks. However, existing approaches based on eye movements often rely on additional hardware (such as high-resolution eye trackers) or involve a time-consuming authentication process, limiting their practicality for smartphones. This paper presents DEyeAuth, a novel dual-authentication system that overcomes these limitations by integrating eyelid patterns with eye gestures for secure and convenient user authentication on smartphones. DEyeAuth first leverages the unique characteristics of eyelid patterns extracted from the upper eyelid margins or creases to distinguish different users and then utilizes four eye gestures (i.e., looking up, down, left, and right) whose dynamism and randomness can counter threats from image and video spoofing to enhance system security. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to discover and prove that the upper eyelid margins and creases can be used as potential biometrics for user authentication. We have implemented the prototype of DEyeAuth on Android platforms and comprehensively evaluated its performance by recruiting 50 volunteers. The experimental results indicate that DEyeAuth achieves a high authentication accuracy of 99.38% with a relatively short authentication time of 6.2 seconds, and is effective in resisting image presentation, video replaying, and mimic attacks.

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) has been an indispensable Location-based Service where the SC server assigns tasks to workers based on the locations of task requesters and workers, raising strong privacy concerns. Limited by the computational and time complexity, existing works prefer differential privacy-based methods to protect location privacy. However, most differential privacy-based works ignore the road network, perturbing locations on two-dimensional plane, resulting in more failures in tasks and moreover extensive privacy disclosure in practice. This paper aims to implement a multi-task assignment with both high utility and efficiency while protecting the location privacy of both task requesters and workers on road networks. Specifically, we design a Road Network-aware Exponential Mechanism and propose an Obfuscated Locations Selection algorithm to guarantee location privacy of all participants and extensive privacy. Then, we propose region distance. Based on this, we further formulate multi-task assignment as a Binary Linear Programming problem and a utility-aware optimization problem. We solve the first problem to obtain optimal efficiency and then propose a utility-aware optimization algorithm for the second problem to improve the utility. Our experiments demonstrate sufficient and stable privacy guarantee and the well-performance on both utility and efficiency of our framework.

The number of vehicles has increased year by year, especially individual vehicles. In addition to meeting basic transportation needs, vehicles are expected to serve varied location-based services and applications for humans. However, it can constitute severe risks for privacy. In this article, we concentrate on one of the most sensitive information, namely, social relationships, that can be inferred from the vehicle mobility data. We propose a social relationship inference model, which provides a new perspective for privacy preservation in human mobility data. In particular, we extract discriminative features from both the spatial and temporal dimensions. Then, the heterogeneous features are being merged with a fusion model to improve the performance of inference. Extensive experiments on the real-world data set validate the effectiveness of the extracted features in estimating social connections and demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the baseline models.

Due to the popularity of mobile computing and mobile sensing, users' traces can now be readily collected to enhance applications' performance. However, users' location privacy may be disclosed to the untrusted data aggregator that collects users' traces. Cloaking users' traces with synthetic traces is a prevalent technique to protect location privacy. But the existing work that synthesizes traces suffers from the social relationship based de-anonymization attacks. To this end, we propose W3-tess that synthesizes privacy-preserving traces via enhancing the plausibility of synthetic traces with social networks. The main idea of W3-tess is to credibly imitate the temporal, spatial, and social behavior of users' mobility, sample the traces that exhibit similar three-dimension mobility behavior, and synthesize traces using the sampled locations. By doing so, W3-tess can provide “differential privacy” on location privacy preservation. In addition, compared to the existing work, W3-tess offers several salient features. First, both location privacy preservation and data utility guarantees are theoretically provable. Second, it is applicable to most geo-data analysis tasks performed by the data aggregator. Experiments on two real-world datasets, loc-Gwalla and loc-Brightkite, have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of W3-tess.

The contradiction between the limited capability of lightweight Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and ever-increasing user demands is a fundamental and challenging problem in the era of IoT. One of the most important challenges is that lightweight IoT devices are generally embedded with fixed applications on resource-constrained hardware, and cannot enable on-demand service provisioning. In this paper, we propose BOAT, a block-streaming application execution scheme based on transparent computing (TC), which can remotely retrieve the necessary parts of traditional applications from edge servers on demand and run them on IoT devices locally. Specifically, we first exploit TC to build a scalable IoT system, where the applications of lightweight IoT devices are stored in edge servers or cloud but can be dynamically loaded on IoT devices in a block-streaming way. Moreover, we present a code partition approach to split the codes of a whole service into numerous functional blocks at the edge side. Such that, IoT devices only need to load necessary blocks of an application to obtain the requested services without loading the whole application codes. A lightweight I/O virtualization mechanism and a fine-grained relocation technology are then developed to support the block-streaming service loading. Our experimental results on a lightweight wearable device demonstrate that the proposed scheme can efficiently achieve flexible service provisioning with improved scalability and reduced service loading delay and energy consumption.

With the increasing popularity of location-based services (LBSs), it is of paramount importance to preserve one's location privacy. The commonly used location privacy preserving approach, location k-anonymity, strives to aggregate the queries of k nearby users within a so-called cloaked region via a trusted third-party anonymizer. As such, the probability to identify the location of every user involved is no more than 1/k, thus offering privacy preservation for users. One inherent limitation of k-anonymity, however, is that all users involved are assumed to be trusted and report their real locations. When location injection attacks (LIAs) are conducted, where the untrusted users inject fake locations (along with fake queries) to the anonymizer, the probability of disclosing one's location privacy could be greatly more than 1/k, yielding a much higher risk of privacy leakage. To tackle this problem, in this paper we present ILLIA, the first work that enables k-anonymity-based privacy preservation against LIA in continuous LBS queries. Central to the ILLIA idea is to explore the pattern of the users' mobility in continuous LBS queries. With a thorough understanding of the users' mobility similarity, a credibility-based k-anonymity scheme is developed, such that ILLIA is able to defense against LIA without requiring in advance knowledge of how fake locations are manipulated while still maintaining high quality of services. Both the effectiveness and the efficiency of ILLIA are validated by extensive simulations on real world dataset loc-Gowalla.