Efficient and Private Federated Trajectory Matching

Abstract: Federated Trajectory Matching (FTM) is gaining increasing importance in big trajectory data analytics, supporting diverse applications such as public health, law enforcement, and emergency response. FTM retrieves trajectories that match with a query trajectory from a large-scale trajectory database, while safeguarding the privacy of trajectories in both the query and the database. A naive solution to FTM is to process the query through Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMC) across the entire database, which is inherently secure yet inevitably slow due to the massive secure operations. A promising acceleration strategy is to filter irrelevant trajectories from the database based on the query, thus reducing the SMC operations. However, a key challenge is how to publish the query in a way that both preserves privacy and enables efficient trajectory filtering. In this paper, we design GIST, a novel framework for efficient Federated Trajectory Matching. GIST is grounded in Geo-Indistinguishability, a privacy criterion dedicated to locations. It employs a new privacy mechanism for the query that facilitates efficient trajectory filtering. We theoretically prove the privacy guarantee of the mechanism and the accuracy of the filtering strategy of GIST. Extensive evaluations on five real datasets show that GIST is significantly faster and incurs up to 3 orders of magnitude lower communication cost than the state-of-the-arts.