CLOPRO: A Framework for Context Cloaking Privacy Protection

Smartphones, loaded with users´ personal information have become the primary computing device for many. This makes privacy an increasingly important issue. To protect the privacy of the context based service users we propose CLOPRO framework (Context Cloaking Privacy Protection) using two non-colluding servers. Each service request has three parameters: identity, context and actual query. The proposed, integrated framework achieves the identity privacy, the context privacy, and the query privacy to reduce the risk of an adversary linking all of the three parameters. The methodology used is as follows: A group of users having a similar query are clustered together, a unique id for each cluster of users is created ensuring identity privacy. The centroid of the location coordinates replaces the actual location for the users in the cluster for location privacy, the query abstraction at multiple levels ensures the query privacy. The refined query is then sent to the service provider for processing. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is established by analyzing CLOPRO privacy protection model and comparing it with the other approaches.