Protecting location privacy in blockchain-based mobile internet of things
Book Chapter
Shahid, AR, Pissinou, N, Talukder, S. (2022). Protecting location privacy in blockchain-based mobile internet of things
. 93-118. 10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_5
Shahid, AR, Pissinou, N, Talukder, S. (2022). Protecting location privacy in blockchain-based mobile internet of things
. 93-118. 10.1007/978-3-031-10507-4_5
Recently, blockchain has received much attention from the mobility-centric Internet of Things (IoT). It is deemed the key to ensuring the built-in integrity of information and security of immutability by design in the peer-to-peer network (P2P) of mobile devices. The core of blockchain security is the usage of asymmetric cryptography where each user has a public and private key. The public keys are shared in the network as a user's ID and address for transactions with the expectation that they do not link to a user's personal data and hence ensure privacy. This perception of default privacy originated with the Bitcoin blockchain where the key distribution is handled by a third party. This concept is widely adapted to other blockchains, a class known as the permissionless blockchain. However, in a permissioned blockchain, the authority of the system has control over the identities of its users. Such information can allow an ill-intentioned authority to map identities with their spatiotemporal data, which undermines the location privacy of a mobile user. In this chapter, we study and quantify the location privacy preservation problem in the context of both permissionless and permissioned blockchain-based IoT systems by considering the scope of key distribution tasks, spatiotemporal correlation among location-based transactions, and communication medium among the IoT devices.
