Semantic and Trade-off Aware Location Privacy Protection in Road Networks via Improved Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization

Location privacy protection is an essential but challenging topic in the field of network security. Although the existing research methods, such as ${k}$ -anonymity, mix zone, and differential privacy, show significant success, they usually neglect the location semantic and the proper trade-off between privacy and utility, which may allow attackers to obtain user privacy information by revealing the semantic correlation between the anonymous region and user’s real location, thus causing privacy leakage. To solve this problem, we propose a location privacy protection scheme based on the $k$ -anonymity technique, which provides practical location privacy-preserving through generating an anonymous set. This paper proposes a new location privacy attack strategy termed semantic relativity attack (SRA), which considers the location semantic problem. Correspondingly, a semantic and trade-off aware location privacy protection mechanism (STA-LPPM) is presented to achieve privacy protection with both high-level privacy and utility. To be specific, we model the location privacy protection as a multi-objective optimization problem and propose the Improved Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (IMOPSO) to generate the optimal anonymous set calculating the well-design fitness functions of the multi-objective optimization problem. In this way, the privacy scheme can provide mobile users with the right balance of privacy protection and service quality. Experiments reveal that our privacy scheme can effectively resist the semantic relativity attack while preventing significant utility degrading.