SkyCloaking: A UAV-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Strategy for Location-Based Service Users

Location-based services (LBSs) play a vital role in many Internet applications. Privacy is a mandatory aspect of these tasks, including protecting the user's sensitive information from malicious entities. Location privacy-preserving mechanisms (LPPMs) were designed to ensure privacy for LBS users, and several strategies have emerged, such as cloaking mechanisms. Likewise, several attacks appeared to threaten the user's privacy, being based on ground-related aspects. Therefore, we must investigate new strategies to enhance privacy protection mechanisms. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can provide assisted coverage to ground users in different tasks, including the support of LPPMs. However, the existing strategies rely on some unfeasible premises, and this collaboration needs to be adequately explored. Therefore, in this study, we propose Sky Cloaking, which promotes the opportunistic connection between ground users and UAVs in such a way the UAVs manage the user's query, creating a cloaking region and hampering the success of an attacker. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrated that SkyCloaking can ensure high levels of location privacy to LBS users with a slight impact on the communication channel, overcoming existing strategies. In the best scenarios, SkyCloaking protected more than 80% of the user trajectory, mitigating the exploitation of users' sensitive information.