Preserving Balance Between Privacy and Data Integrity in Edge-Assisted Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the edge jointly broaden the IoT's sensing capability and the monitoring scope for various applications. Though accessing sensing data and making decisions through IoT smart devices turns out to be commonplace, it is challenging to guarantee user privacy and preserve the accuracy (integrity) of the collected data. The IoT smart devices frequently lose either IoT user's privacy or data integrity. This also makes it crucial to put a threshold on the cost of computation and load of the IoT devices, as gradually more IoT services demand access to the resources that devices offer. In this article, we propose BalancePIC, a scheme that attempts to preserve a balance in the three aspects (user privacy, data integrity in edge-assisted IoT devices, and the computational cost). It achieves the balance through a balanced truth discovery approach and a proposed enhanced technique for data privacy, which are used in IoT devices and edge server interactions. It authenticates the IoT user participation with privacy in the truth discovery process through a biometric-ECC-based authentication algorithm. The nature of the BalancePIC scheme is to straightforwardly provide the likelihood for a simple amendment on the cryptography technique and weight assignment. This lessens the overall computational cost for the IoT user devices but also restricts the communications between the user devices and the edge server, which is important for data integrity. We present an enhanced technique to preserve privacy by guarding the user from potential threats and suspicious data collection parties. To achieve this, BalancePIC takes steps to blur the original sensory data of the device by processing results in groups called zones. Simulation result analysis provides evidence for the balance preservation in the three aspects.