Efficient security policy enforcement in a location based service environment

Location based services, one of the promising markets of mobile commerce, aims at delivering point of need personalized information. Often, these services to be delivered are based on the prior knowledge of the profiles of mobile customers and security and privacy policies dictated by them. These policies may specify revealing the sensitive information of mobile customers (e.g., age, salary) selectively to specific merchants in return of receiving certain benefits (e.g., coupons, special discounts, etc.). As a result, the security policies in such an environment are characterized by spatial and temporal attributes of the mobile customers (location and time), as well as their profile attributes. The focus of this paper is to efficiently enforce such policies. In this regard, we propose a unified structure that is capable of indexing mobile customer (mobile object) locations and their profiles, and the authorizations stating their security and privacy policies.