Comprehensive Review: Privacy Protection of User in Location-Aware Services of Mobile Cloud Computing

One of the recent trends of networking and mobile technology is mobile cloud computing (MCC) that provides rich computational, storage resources and services in clouds to mobile users. MCC applications provide a variety of services to users and one of them is the location-based services (LBS) applications that are widely spread. By using mobile applications and LBS, mobile devices act as a thin client where the abundant data locations are collected and stored at the mobile cloud to provide corresponding services. Privacy of the user's location has been a renewed research interest and extensively studied in recent years. However, privacy is one of the most important challenges in MCC because the user's location on mobile devices is offloaded from mobile devices to cloud providers which can be utilized by third parties. Since protecting the privacy of the user is the key to maintain the trust on the mobile environment. LBS faces issues in protecting privacy such as, the privacy of user's current location, which may contain private information. In case, if the user's current location is compromised through unauthorized access, it possibly results in severe consequences. Therefore, protecting location privacy of the user while achieving precise location is still a challenge in MCC. This comprehensive research review will provide the challenge of protecting the privacy of user's location in MCC; analyze several related works regarding the issue. In addition, it suggests possible solutions related to the issue, in lighted few shortcomings which still needs attention with few related case studies.