Integration of Privacy Protection Mechanisms in Location-Based Services

In the next few years, we will see the upcoming of location-based services. Such LBSs will be extremely heterogeneous. Protecting the privacy of the users in such a situation requires flexible approaches. A single privacy protection mechanism is often insufficient. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First we present LbSprint, a middleware architecture for location-based services which integrates different privacy mechanisms by means of the standard XACML language. The system administrator can configure and extend the set of such mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal of an architecture which integrates many privacy mechanisms in an extensible way. Secondly, we present practical optimizations which considerably improves the performance of the XACML policy evaluation process.