(A) restorable spatial obfuscation method for location privacy protection and digital forensic readiness

Abstract

As the importance of location privacy has emerged, location privacy-preserving mechanisms (LPPMs) have been proposed to reduce the accuracy to a demanded level by adding noise into location data. Despite a requirement of accurate location in some particular cases in digital forensics(e.g., epidemic prevention), previous LPPMs cannot support those emerging case due to absent of a location recovery technique. In this paper, we propose a restorable LPPM that can be satisfied not only location privacy protection, but also digital forensic readiness. The proposed LPPM encrypts partial bits of location data instead of adding random noise into the location. As the result, the LPPM can reduce the accuracy of a location to the required level while enabling restoration of the location. In addition, the LPPM can be applied without modification of a location-based system. Therefore, the LPPM can contribute realistic digital investigation.