Security and Privacy in Location-Based Service

Dear Colleagues,

Location-based service (LBS) technologies have grown dramatically in popularity in recent years thanks to the advance of technology in the fields of wireless communication, localization, and the internet of things (IoT). By collecting geographic data and information, these devices provide a variety of services such as navigation service, indoor/outdoor object searching, location-based advertising, and recommendation systems. A typical LBS requires the establishment of a bi-directional channel between the user and server, and the exchange of data often includes sensitive location information, a reality which potentially brings security and privacy leakage issues. Unfortunately, most vendors prioritize the quality of service over the security and user privacy of LBSs, leading to a situation where the user’s devices are riddled with security vulnerabilities in practice. Hence, LBSs are often exposed to attacks that possess the capacity to easily leak users' location privacy to attackers. This damage can be harmful to users. For example, disclosing a user's location information allows an external attacker to analyze the spatial–temporal relationship and obtain private information in advance, such as routine schedule, occupation, income, health condition, etc.

Given the importance of privacy, managing LBSs while preserving user location privacy has risen as a popular research topic. Some studies have investigated and explored location privacy issues in various applications, such as 4G and 5G cellular networks, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), IoT networks, control and network systems, cognitive radio networks, self-organizing networks, and so on. However, research into location privacy-preserving mechanisms is relatively lacking. Privacy leaks from both attack and defense remains an open area of research, especially in light of the challenge of privacy protection with the integration of LBSs and other thriving technologies.

This Special Issue aims to cover recent findings on theoretical advancement and practical challenges on lbs in recent architectures such as WSN, IoT networks, 5G, 6G, and so on. Offensive and defensive applications combined with machine learning technology or differential privacy mechanism are the potential subjects of research articles. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Secure and location privacy-preserving protocol design in LBS;
• Location privacy-preserving mechanism for LBS;
• Secure and robust LBS in 5G, 6G, IoT, WSN, or radio network;
• Secure and robust LBS in vehicular network;
• The trade-off between privacy budget and utility in LBS;
• Privacy-preserving in high-speed and low-latency network;
• Decentralized LBS.

Prof. Dr. Min-Te Sun
Dr. Chia-Yu Lin
Dr. Hao-Tsung Yang
Guest Editors

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• location privacy
• location-based services
• privacy-preserving mechanism
• cybersecurity
• trustworthiness