An efficient privacy-preserving system for monitoring mobile users: making searchable encryption practical

Monitoring location updates from mobile users has important applications in several areas, ranging from public safety and national security to social networks and advertising. However, sensitive information can be derived from movement patterns, so protecting the privacy of mobile users is a major concern. Users may only be willing to disclose their locations when some condition is met, for instance in proximity of a disaster area, or when an event of interest occurs nearby. Currently, such functionality is achieved using searchable encryption. Such cryptographic primitives provide provable guarantees for privacy, and allow decryption only when the location satisfies some predicate. Nevertheless, they rely on expensive pairing-based cryptography (PBC), and direct application to the domain of location updates leads to impractical solutions. We propose secure and efficient techniques for private processing of location updates that complement the use of PBC and lead to significant gains in performance by reducing the amount of required pairing operations. We also implement two optimizations that further improve performance: materialization of results to expensive mathematical operations, and parallelization. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly improve performance compared to the baseline, and reduce the searchable encryption overhead to a level that is practical in a computing environment with reasonable resources, such as the cloud.