Secure Data Deduplication Protocol for Edge-Assisted Mobile CrowdSensing Services

Data deduplication for edge-based mobile crowdsensing services removes duplicate data to minimize storage space and enhance communication efficiency. However, secure data deduplication in edge-based mobile crowdsensing applications can be challenging to achieve in concurrent with protecting sensing data and participants (e.g., client and recruited mobile users) from various threats (i.e., inside attacks and outside attacks). In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure data deduplication protocol for edge-assisted mobile crowdsensing services. Specifically, certificateless public key cryptography is first employed to generate the private and public keys of the crowdsensing server center and edge nodes. Then, a novel method is created to detect and eliminate duplicates while preventing the duplicate-linking from being leaked. Next, we demonstrate that the presented scheme achieves both privacy and security attributes typically required of mobile crowdsening applications. Finally, the performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol incurs minimal computation and communication costs compared with the state of the art research.