Checking in without worries: Location privacy in location based social networks

In current location based social networks (LBSNs), users expose their location when they check in at a venue or search a place. The release of location privacy could lead to a severe breach of other privacy, such as identity or health condition. In this paper, we propose a framework to safeguard users' location information as well as the check-in records. Considering the special demands in LBSNs, we design a novel index structure to provide a fast search for users when they check in at the same venue frequently. At the same time, our framework outsources the heavy cryptographic computations to the server to reduce the computational overhead for mobile clients. Due to the dynamic feature of LBSNs, our framework uses a lightweight approach to handle a user's revoked friends and new friends. We prove the security of our framework in the random oracle model and demonstrate its efficiency on a Motorola Droid phone.