Location and mobility data are highly sensitive, as they can be used to infer a number of other personal and sensitive data on an individual. Human mobility is also highly predictable, and location information is routinely collected by location-aware devices (e.g. smartphones), connected vehicles and smart transportation systems, e-tolling, and cameras with face recognition among others. For these reasons, strong privacy preserving technologies are needed in order to protect sensitive personal information. As location based services expand into new areas, such as autonomous vehicles and drones, new security mechanisms need to be developed.

Location privacy is a rapidly developing research area. The Special Issue “Privacy and Security for Location-based Services and Devices” will provide a platform for original research contributions on all technical aspects of privacy of location data and security of location-based services and devices.

This special issue will cover all aspects of privacy and security in location-based systems and services, and will space from structures, protocols ad cryptographic schemes for privacy-preserving computation of location data, to application scenarios such as social media, autonomous vehicles, drones etc. Papers highlighting challenges and solutions for location monitoring in industrial environments and critical infrastructures, as well as papers proposing novel methodologies to evaluate, measure and assert the security of location-based devices will be particularly encouraged. In addition to research articles, we invite papers describing state of industrial practice in this area.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Location privacy

- Security of location-aware mobile devices

- Privacy-enhancing technologies for location-based services

- Privacy and anonymity in (public) transportation systems

- Privacy in connected autonomous vehicles

- Security of smart mobility applications

- Privacy in location-aware social media

- Privacy in position-based advertising

- Malicious and pervasive tracking, de-anonymization

- Cryptographic protocols and schemes for location information

- Data structures for location information

- Security and reliability of positioning systems

- Location verification and authentication

- Location forensics

- Data protection techniques for regulatory (GDPR) compliance

Given the goal of the special issue to provide an authoritative starting point for future research, we encourage the authors to provide a comprehensive treatment of related work, both in research and state of the practice.

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: December 15, 2019
Authors notification (first round of reviews): February 28, 2020
Revised manuscript due: April 15, 2020
Final decision (including 2nd revision if needed): July 15, 2020

GUEST EDITORS
Dr. Constantinos Patsakis, University of Piraeus, Greece
Dr. Paolo Palmieri, University College Cork, Ireland
Dr. Luca Calderoni, University of Bologna, Italy