A Privacy Protection Mechanism for Location-based Mobile Coupons

Mobile technologies have created unprecedented opportunities for innovative marketing strategies. Location-based mobile coupons are at the cutting edge of these strategies. They provide a method to offer deals to mobile customers based on where they are at a certain time. However, revealing one's location in exchange for a service poses privacy threats ranging from discovery of personal details to being watched or tracked. This paper proposes a novel privacy protection mechanism for location-based coupons using an anonymous authentication method. The proposed mechanism protects against two adversaries: a global adversary that observes all the exchanged location information and an eavesdropper that listens to the communications on the wireless channel. It ensures user privacy and anonymity and prevents users from being tracked using self-generated pseudonyms. Furthermore, restriction applied on pseudonyms avoids all coupons to be grabbed by a greedy user.