Monero Covert Communication-Enhanced Collaboration for Privacy-Preserving Queries

Most existing user-collaborative privacy protection mechanisms in location-based services assume that collaborative group members are trustworthy and can strictly enforce collaboration rules. Such assumptions do not match reality and reduce the usability of the schemes. In this paper, a Monero covert communication-enhanced collaborative privacy-preserving framework is presented for mobile query services. Built on blockchain networks, this solution enables secure in-group interaction and behavior collection, enabling group members without trust to collaborate efficiently. A lightweight key negotiation is developed to support in-group Monero covert communication on blockchain networks to prevent in-group eavesdropping and selfish behavior. Blockchainassisted behavior collection and evidence recording ensure efficient and secure execution of in-group collaboration. Security analysis and simulation results demonstrate the proposed scheme achieves high security and privacy levels with low communication and computational costs in queries.