SMCP: a Secure Mobile Crowdsensing Protocol for fog-based applications

The possibility of performing complex data analysis through sets of cooperating personal smart devices has recently encouraged the definition of new distributed computing paradigms. The general idea behind these approaches is to move early analysis towards the edge of the network, while relying on other intermediate (fog) or remote (cloud) devices for computations of increasing complexity. Unfortunately, because both of their distributed nature and high degree of modularity, edge-fog-cloud computing systems are particularly prone to cyber security attacks that can be performed against every element of the infrastructure. In order to address this issue, in this paper we present SMCP, a Secure Mobile Crowdsensing Protocol for fog-based applications that exploit lightweight encryption techniques that are particularly suited for low-power mobile edge devices. In order to assess the performance of the proposed security mechanisms, we consider as case study a distributed human activity recognition scenario in which machine learning algorithms are performed by users’ personal smart devices at the edge and fog layers. The functionalities provided by SMCP have been directly compared with two state-of-the-art security protocols. Results show that our approach allows to achieve a higher degree of security while maintaining a low computational cost

Security and Privacy Preservation in Mobile Crowdsensing

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a compelling paradigm that enables a crowd of individuals to cooperatively collect and share data to measure phenomena or record events of common interest using their mobile devices. Pairing with inherent mobility and intelligence, mobile users can collect, produce and upload large amounts of data to service providers based on crowdsensing tasks released by customers, ranging from general information, such as temperature, air quality and traffic condition, to more specialized data, such as recommended places, health condition and voting intentions. Compared with traditional sensor networks, MCS can support large-scale sensing applications, improve sensing data trustworthiness and reduce the cost on deploying expensive hardware or software to acquire high-quality data. Despite the appealing benefits, however, MCS is also confronted with a variety of security and privacy threats, which would impede its rapid development. Due to their own incentives and vulnerabilities of service providers, data security and user privacy are being put at risk. The corruption of sensing reports may directly affect crowdsensing results, and thereby mislead customers to make irrational decisions. Moreover, the content of crowdsensing tasks may expose the intention of customers, and the sensing reports might inadvertently reveal sensitive information about mobile users. Data encryption and anonymization techniques can provide straightforward solutions for data security and user privacy, but there are several issues, which are of significantly importance to make MCS practical. First of all, to enhance data trustworthiness, service providers need to recruit mobile users based on their personal information, such as preferences, mobility pattern and reputation, resulting in the privacy exposure to service providers. Secondly, it is inevitable to have replicate data in crowdsensing reports, which may possess large communication bandwidth, but traditional data encryption makes replicate data detection and deletion challenging. Thirdly, crowdsensed data analysis is essential to generate crowdsensing reports in MCS, but the correctness of crowdsensing results in the absence of malicious mobile users and service providers become a huge concern for customers. Finally yet importantly, even if user privacy is preserved during task allocation and data collection, it may still be exposed during reward distribution. It further discourage mobile users from task participation. In this thesis, we explore the approaches to resolve these challenges in MCS. Based on the architecture of MCS, we conduct our research with the focus on security and privacy protection without sacrificing data quality and users' enthusiasm. Specifically, the main contributions are, i) to enable privacy preservation and task allocation, we propose SPOON, a strong privacy-preserving mobile crowdsensing scheme supporting accurate task allocation. In SPOON, the service provider recruits mobile users based on their locations, and selects proper sensing reports according to their trust levels without invading user privacy. By utilizing the blind signature, sensing tasks are protected and reports are anonymized. In addition, a privacy-preserving credit management mechanism is introduced to achieve decentralized trust management and secure credit proof for mobile users; ii) to improve communication efficiency while guaranteeing data confidentiality, we propose a fog-assisted secure data deduplication scheme, in which a BLS-oblivious pseudo-random function is developed to enable fog nodes to detect and delete replicate data in sensing reports without exposing the content of reports. Considering the privacy leakages of mobile users who report the same data, the blind signature is utilized to hide users' identities, and chameleon hash function is leveraged to achieve contribution claim and reward retrieval for anonymous greedy mobile users; iii) to achieve data statistics with privacy preservation, we propose a privacy-preserving data statistics scheme to achieve end-to-end security and integrity protection, while enabling the aggregation of the collected data from multiple sources. The correctness verification is supported to prevent the corruption of the aggregate results during data transmission based on the homomorphic authenticator and the proxy re-signature. A privacy-preserving verifiable linear statistics mechanism is developed to realize the linear aggregation of multiple crowdsensed data from a same device and the verification on the correctness of aggregate results; and iv) to encourage mobile users to participating in sensing tasks, we propose a dual-anonymous reward distribution scheme to offer the incentive for mobile users and privacy protection for both customers and mobile users in MCS. Based on the dividable cash, a new reward sharing incentive mechanism is developed to encourage mobile users to participating in sensing tasks, and the randomization technique is leveraged to protect the identities of customers and mobile users during reward claim, distribution and deposit

The survey on Near Field Communication

PubMed ID: 26057043Near Field Communication (NFC) is an emerging short-range wireless communication technology that offers great and varied promise in services such as payment, ticketing, gaming, crowd sourcing, voting, navigation, and many others. NFC technology enables the integration of services from a wide range of applications into one single smartphone. NFC technology has emerged recently, and consequently not much academic data are available yet, although the number of academic research studies carried out in the past two years has already surpassed the total number of the prior works combined. This paper presents the concept of NFC technology in a holistic approach from different perspectives, including hardware improvement and optimization, communication essentials and standards, applications, secure elements, privacy and security, usability analysis, and ecosystem and business issues. Further research opportunities in terms of the academic and business points of view are also explored and discussed at the end of each section. This comprehensive survey will be a valuable guide for researchers and academicians, as well as for business in the NFC technology and ecosystem.Publisher's Versio

Privacy-Protecting Techniques for Behavioral Data: A Survey

Our behavior (the way we talk, walk, or think) is unique and can be used as a biometric trait. It also correlates with sensitive attributes like emotions. Hence, techniques to protect individuals privacy against unwanted inferences are required. To consolidate knowledge in this area, we systematically reviewed applicable anonymization techniques. We taxonomize and compare existing solutions regarding privacy goals, conceptual operation, advantages, and limitations. Our analysis shows that some behavioral traits (e.g., voice) have received much attention, while others (e.g., eye-gaze, brainwaves) are mostly neglected. We also find that the evaluation methodology of behavioral anonymization techniques can be further improved

From Zebras to Tigers: Incentivizing participation in Crowd-sensing applications through fair and private Bitcoin rewards

In this work we develop a rewarding framework that can be used as a building block in crowd-sensing applications. Although a core requirement of such systems is user engagement, people may be reluctant to participate as sensitive information about them may be leaked or inferred from submitted data. Thus monetary incentives could help attract a large number of participants, thereby increasing not only the amount but also the quality of sensed data. Our first contribution in this work is to ensure that users can submit data and obtain Bitcoin payments in a privacy-preserving manner, preventing curious providers from linking the data or the payments back to the user. At the same time, we thwart malicious user behavior such as double-redeeming attempts where a user tries to obtain rewards for multiple submissions of the same data. More importantly, we ensure the fairness of the exchange in a completely trustless manner; by relying on the Blockchain, we eliminate the trust placed on third parties in traditional fair exchange protocols. Finally, our system is highly efficient as most of the protocol steps do not utilize the Blockchain network. When they do, we only rely on simple Bitcoin transactions as opposed to prior works that are based on the use of highly complex smart contracts