Privacy-Preserving and Trustworthy Mobile Sensing with Fair Incentives

Pervasive mobile devices and their advances in sensing and networking have led to an emerging mobile sensing paradigm. The diversity of mobile users and the openness of sensing systems raise several crucial concerns for users' privacy, data quantity, and quality. Although different aspects of these issues were addressed separately in existing researches, there is still a need to provide a holistic solution for secure and privacy-aware mobile sensing. In this paper, we propose a privacy-aware and trustworthy mobile sensing scheme with fair incentives. Leveraging group signature, (partial) blind signature, and limited number of pseudonyms technologies, our scheme enables well-behaved users to contribute their data anonymously, and prevents both greedy and malicious users from abusing the privacy protection. Moreover, we design a fair incentive scheme to stimulate users to contribute high-quality data, based on the data quality and the reputation feedback level. Security analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme achieves the security goals. Extensive evaluation results are presented which demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme.