A location-based service scheme with attribute information privacy

Zhiguo Dai; Jichao Li

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0309919

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 29, 2024
30 Jul 2024 Decision Letter - Zhiquan Liu, Editor PONE-D-24-26572A location-based service scheme with attribute information privacyPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Dai, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 13 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Please be assured that, once you have provided your new statement, the assessment of your exemption will not hold up the peer review process. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Partly Reviewer #3: Partly ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: I Don't Know Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: In this paper, the authors try to propose a CP-ABE based PIR by utilizing CP-ABE technology. However, the following questions should be considered. (1) Inadequate motivation and problem formulation: The introduction fails to convincingly motivate the need for a CP-ABE based PIR. The specific research problems and challenges that the paper aims to address are not clearly articulated. The claimed contributions are not well-positioned against prior works, making it hard to gauge their significance. A stronger case needs to be made for why the proposed CP-ABE based PIR is an important advancement over existing solutions. (2) Lack of technical depth and insights: The proposed construction does not offer significant technical innovations beyond combining existing techniques from CP-ABE based PIR. The paper lacks new concepts, insights, or design principles that push forward the state-of-the-art in this domain. (3) In this paper, the authors proposed a CP-ABE based PIR by utilizing CP-ABE technology. However, the authors do not give the related works about CP-ABE. (4) The authors proposed a CP-ABE based PIR. However, they do not give the concrete name of the related algorithms. (5) The proposed CP-ABE based PIR is not complete. Especially, key generation algorithm is not given. How can you encrypt and decrypt? Reviewer #2: 1. It is not clear, what is the role of f(x) in algorithm 1?2. No threat model is presented in the paper. It will be good to include the threat model and present the security analysis accordingly. 3. It is not clear whether the LBS will know who is sending the query or not? If the LBS knows the individual who sends the query then privacy is lost.4. Decryption proof of correctness may be with all steps involved. It is not clear how the second step is derived from the first step. 5. Zero Knowledge conceal is used in table 2 however no where it is described.6. Figure 8 should be rechecked. X-axis is not clear. Is it time or the number of queries? Similarly figure 6. 6. The novelty should be clearly presented. Reviewer #3: In this manuscript, in this paper, based on the conception of ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), a PIR scheme based on CP-ABE is proposed for preserving the personal privacy in LBS. Personal privacy in LBS is a topic worth studying. However, there are some issues to consider: 1. In the “Introduction”, the authors described that “the superiority of this scheme can be reflected in both privacy preservation and quality of service”. However, the quality of service is not represented in the scheme, if the quality of service is the innovation point, it should be described in detail in the scheme, and it needs to be reflected in the abstract and contribution. 2. The “3.1 The conception of CP-ABE based PIR” should describ in the “Preliminaries”, and the system architecture and privacy threats are more appropriate in the “CP-ABE based PIR”, the front of the scheme description. 3. What is the relationship between this scheme and literature 8, and what are the advantages of this scheme compared with literature 8? ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. 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Revision 1
6 Aug 2024 Author Response Response to reviewer's comments Reviewer #1: In this paper, the authors try to propose a CP-ABE based PIR by utilizing CP-ABE technology. However, the following questions should be considered. (1) Inadequate motivation and problem formulation: The introduction fails to convincingly motivate the need for a CP-ABE based PIR. The specific research problems and challenges that the paper aims to address are not clearly articulated. The claimed contributions are not well-positioned against prior works, making it hard to gauge their significance. A stronger case needs to be made for why the proposed CP-ABE based PIR is an important advancement over existing solutions. We add the formulation for the threat model to further promote the innovation of the motivation, and add the proof for why the LPPCAP utilizes CP-ABE based PIR to preserve the privacy of user in LBS. In addition, in the introduction, we also add the motivation of why we utilize CP-ABE based PIR and the claim the contribution of this work. (2) Lack of technical depth and insights: The proposed construction does not offer significant technical innovations beyond combining existing techniques from CP-ABE based PIR. The paper lacks new concepts, insights, or design principles that push forward the state-of-the-art in this domain. We change the construction of this manuscript and emphasize the innovation of LPPCAP to further demonstrate the insights of this manuscript. (3) In this paper, the authors proposed a CP-ABE based PIR by utilizing CP-ABE technology. However, the authors do not give the related works about CP-ABE. We add some CP-ABE and PIR algorithms used in LBS in the related work to demonstrate these schemes can be used in LBS. However the quality of service of these existing schemes is weaker than LPPCAP and we demonstrate this in the experiment result. (4) The authors proposed a CP-ABE based PIR. However, they do not give the concrete name of the related algorithms. We change the proposed scheme into LPPCAP and then modify the whole manuscript. (5) The proposed CP-ABE based PIR is not complete. Especially, key generation algorithm is not given. How can you encrypt and decrypt? We add the key generation algorithm in 3.2. Reviewer #2: 1.It is not clear, what is the role of f(x) in algorithm 1? We delete the f(x) in algorithm 1. 2.No threat model is presented in the paper. It will be good to include the threat model and present the security analysis accordingly. We add the threat model in 2.1, and formulate it with probabilityand then present the security analysis in 4.1. 3.It is not clear whether the LBS will know who is sending the query or not? If the LBS knows the individual who sends the query then privacy is lost. We add the process of how the LBS server know the query and location of the user in the threat model in 2.1, in this part, the way of privacy leakage of user is given. 4. Decryption proof of correctness may be with all steps involved. It is not clear how the second step is derived from the first step. We add the precise step in algorithm 4, so as to give a clear steps for decryption. 5. Zero Knowledge conceal is used in table 2 however no where it is described. We add the description of Zero Knowledge leakage about our scheme below table 2. 6. Figure 8 should be rechecked. X-axis is not clear. Is it time or the number of queries? Similarly figure 6. The X-axis of figure 8 is queries, and we change all figures in the whole manuscript. 7. The novelty should be clearly presented. We change the introduction as well as the abstract to further emphasize the novelty of this manuscript. Reviewer #3: In this manuscript, in this paper, based on the conception of ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), a PIR scheme based on CP-ABE is proposed for preserving the personal privacy in LBS. Personal privacy in LBS is a topic worth studying. However, there are some issues to consider: 1. In the “Introduction”, the authors described that “the superiority of this scheme can be reflected in both privacy preservation and quality of service”. However, the quality of service is not represented in the scheme, if the quality of service is the innovation point, it should be described in detail in the scheme, and it needs to be reflected in the abstract and contribution. The quality of service of LPPCAP is a part of innovation, so we add the reflection of this point in both the abstract and contribution. 2. The “3.1 The conception of CP-ABE based PIR” should describ in the “Preliminaries”, and the system architecture and privacy threats are more appropriate in the “CP-ABE based PIR”, the front of the scheme description. We change the conception of LPPCAP in the “Preliminaries”, and then change the system architecture and the threat model to further appropriate to the conception of LPPCAP in 2.3. 3. What is the relationship between this scheme and literature 8, and what are the advantages of this scheme compared with literature 8? The basic idea and conception of our proposed LPPCAP is derived from literature 8, however, in literature 8, the proposed scheme is mainly in theoretical and without any practice. So in this manuscript,we attempt to utilize the theoretical result in LBS to further the utilization of protocol proposed in literature. In addition, LPPCAP can be seen as a practical of the theory produced in literature [8]. We add the description of above in 4.1. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309919.r002
14 Aug 2024 Decision Letter - Zhiquan Liu, Editor PONE-D-24-26572R1A location-based service scheme with attribute information privacyPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Dai, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 28 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'. An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. 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Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Additional Editor Comments:Almost all reviewers are very positive about the contribution of this paper, and also point out some constructive comments. Please revise as much as possible according to the opinions as soon as possible, and submit the revised version to ensure that this paper can be published quickly. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #4: (No Response) ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #2: Partly Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: I Don't Know Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: The grammatical error in the revision part (in yellow color) has to be rechecked. The sentences are not complete or not conveying the meaning. Reviewer #4: In this scheme, query and feedback are encrypted with security two-parties calculation by the user and the LBS server, so as not to violate any personal privacy and decrease the processing time in encrypting the retrieved information. In addition, this scheme can also preserve the attribute privacy of users such as the query frequency as well as the moving manner. This article is well written, I think it can be accepted, while the following comments should be revised. (1) The title of the picture is recommended to be placed below the picture, not above it. (2) In the figure of experimental results, it is suggested to add references for comparison schemes. (3) A related work, fct: a fully-distributed context-aware trust model for location based service recommendation, is suggested to be discussed or compared in related work. (4) It is recommended that the serial number before Introduction be changed to 1. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #4: No ******** [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309919.r003
Revision 2
19 Aug 2024 Author Response Response to reviewer's comments Reviewer #2: The grammatical error in the revision part (in yellow color) has to be rechecked. The sentences are not complete or not conveying the meaning. We rechecked the revision part (in yellow color) and changed these sentences. Reviewer #4: In this scheme, query and feedback are encrypted with security two-parties calculation by the user and the LBS server, so as not to violate any personal privacy and decrease the processing time in encrypting the retrieved information. In addition, this scheme can also preserve the attribute privacy of users such as the query frequency as well as the moving manner. This article is well written, I think it can be accepted, while the following comments should be revised. (1) The title of the picture is recommended to be placed below the picture, not above it. (2) In the figure of experimental results, it is suggested to add references for comparison schemes. (3) A related work, fct: a fully-distributed context-aware trust model for location based service recommendation, is suggested to be discussed or compared in related work. (4) It is recommended that the serial number before Introduction be changed to 1. (1)We change the title of the picture to the place below the picture. (2)The references are added in figure of experimental results. (3)A related work is discussed in related work, and we added it as “Liu et al. [30] also proposed a fully-distributed context-aware trust model for location based service. ” in section 2. (4)The serial number before Introduction is changed to 1. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309919.r004
21 Aug 2024 Decision Letter - Zhiquan Liu, Editor A location-based service scheme with attribute information privacy PONE-D-24-26572R2 Dear Dr. Dai, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Prof. Zhiquan Liu Academic Editor Jinan University zqliu@vip.qq.com https://www.zqliu.com Additional Editor Comments (optional): Accept Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309919.r005
Formally Accepted
28 Aug 2024 Acceptance Letter - Zhiquan Liu, Editor PONE-D-24-26572R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Dai, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Zhiquan Liu Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309919.r006

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