A location-based privacy-preserving oblivious sharing scheme for indoor navigation

In recent years, with the rapid development of wireless communication technology and mobile devices, etc., indoor localization and navigation using WiFi sensing are increasingly being widely employed in life. On this basis, various applications of location-based services have been rapidly developed. However, when users enjoy the location query service of LBS providers, there is a risk of exposing personal information and location privacy simultaneously. In particular, the sensitive information about users based on their location privacy can be inferred by malicious users. Therefore, how to implement location hiding, query privacy protection and query result feedback at the same time is one of the crucial issues of LBS privacy protection. A novel oblivious data sharing scheme employing the designed 1-out-of-n oblivious transfer protocol is proposed to achieve an efficient location-based service for users while effectively hiding location coordinates and protecting the privacy of users and servers. In addition, once a user accesses the same keyword several times, the server is bound to be able to master the accessed frequency of keywords. For this reason, the string length-based transformation algorithm based on private information retrieval is designed and added as a part of OT protocol, which effectively reduces the communication overhead and ensures the privacy of required keywords. The security and performance analysis indicate that the proposed protocol can be instantiated in indoor navigation with high security and efficiency.