An Effective Target Recovery Method from a Source Location in Geo-Indistinguishable Surroundings

Location-based services have become increasingly more pervasive in the context of Internet of Vehicles. Nowadays, vehicles can transfer their locations to the server for route planning, attractions searching, location sharing, etc. However, the data that are transmitted over the public channel may be tracked/tampered by the attacker. Therefore, location privacy is one of the major concerns to the researchers, and several mechanisms have been designed by obfuscating the user’s original location prior to transmitting it to the server. The most intuitive method for finding the target, in case an event occurs and the server needs to find original location, is to ask all of the users near to the event to return their original locations in order to find the target. In such a scenario, a large number of users are required to acknowledge their locations. Hence, how to reduce the number of affected users in the process of finding the target among the users’ obfuscated locations is an important issue. Therefore, we devise a method of identifying the target and reducing the number of affected users in an efficient way.