A novel privacy protection scheme for participatory sensing with incentives

With the increasing popularity of smart phones, a new collaborative sensing application, named participatory sensing, gradually appeared. The key idea of participatory sensing is to employ so many users to collect and share sensed data using their mobile phones. Current relevant applications are mainly focused on how to collect sensed data. Few methods have been proposed for user privacy in participatory sensing applications. We proposed a novel privacy protection scheme for participatory sensing applications. In this scheme, we use the pseudonym, encryption function and hash function to protect the user's privacy and meanwhile to carry out incentives. Finally, we present an analysis of our protocol to show that our protocol meets the security requirements of participatory sensing application.