BSIF: Blockchain-Based Secure, Interactive, and Fair Mobile Crowdsensing

Given the explosive growth of portable devices, mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is becoming an essential approach that fully utilizes pervasive idle resources to accomplish sensing tasks. The traditional MCS relies on the centralized server for task handle is susceptible to a single point of failure. Targeting this security issue, researchers have proposed a series of blockchain-based MCS. However, nodes in the blockchain suffer from high computation cost for data processing. Simultaneously, most blockchain-based MCS systems lack an efficient incentive mechanism for service requesters and workers. In this work, we integrate the smart contract and mobile devices to establish a secure, interactive, and fair blockchain-based MCS system called BSIF. To prevent illegitimate participants, BSIF requests all users to verify their identities using private keys from the registration phase. In the case of worker location privacy leakage, the location-based symmetric key generator is adopted to coordinate a session key for target range worker selection. Besides, we transfer the data evaluation process to the requester side (e.g., a personal computer), reducing computation cost in the blockchain nodes. Due to the homomorphic feature of the Paillier Cryptosystem and common interest, the requester cannot violate the directives from the blockchain. Subsequently, the Stackelberg game is adopted to investigate the participation level of the workers and the fair reward mechanism for the requesters to achieve a dynamic balance. Finally, the security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that our BSIF can defend against possible adversaries while significantly cutting overhead and giving participants the utmost incentive.