Protecting the privacy of users’ data while maintaining reliability and accuracy in crowded events remains an open issue, especially with the growing capabilities and resources of attackers. This challenge becomes more difficult in dynamic environments with moving users/devices. Unfortunately, the current privacy-preserving methods suffer from several drawbacks that include reliability and accuracy of results, the need to fully trust a third party, or the incurrence of heavy overheads. This research presents a novel approach that is enhanced by peer cooperation, which is one of the most suitable techniques for crowded environments. The proposed approach is called “Smart Monikers with Multi-Peer Cooperation (SM2Peer)”. The SM2Peer addresses all the drawbacks of the traditional peer cooperation approach through two scenarios. In addition, the SM2Peer exploits the fog computing layer to control the cooperation among peers effectively, where each fog node manages several peers with smart moniker management. Moreover, SM2Peer provides multiple caches to relax the total overhead. The simulation and comparison with other common privacy approaches show the superiority of the SM2Peer in many aspects and metrics of privacy without a significant effect on performance.
Sen et al. (Tue,) studied this question.