Abstract
Air quality in urban environments has become a central issue of our present society as it affects the health and lives of the population all over the world. The first step in mitigating negative effects is proper measurement of the pollution level. This work presents a portable air pollution measurement system, built from off-the-shelf devices, that is designed to assure user privacy and data authenticity. Data is collected from sensor modules that can be hand carried or installed on vehicles, possibly leading to a vehicular sensor network that may cover a larger area. The main challenge is to provide authenticity for the sensor data while also ensuring user privacy. The proposed system assures authenticity and non-repudiation for the collected data by using group signatures and a blockchain-like structure for secure storage. We use regular key-exchange protocols based on elliptic curve cryptography in order to securely bootstrap a session key, then we benefit from secure tunneling to export data from sensors to the remote server. Post-update tampering is prevented by the use of a blockchain-like structure on the data server. We carry experiments both to determine the computational requirements of the procedures, as well as to measure indicators of air quality on nearby areas.
Highlights
Introduction and MotivationAmbient air pollution is one of the most widespread environmental hazards in urban settlements as it affects the population’s health all over the world
Current approaches for monitoring air pollution use expensive, stationary equipment, which limits the spatial resolutions of the measurements, making them relevant for macro-scale air quality mapping [3]
The signature assures the authenticity of all measurements included in the hash chain. This mechanism is required in order to reduce the number of signatures applied. (Signatures are require more time to compute than hash values.) When the signatures of the sensor node arrives to the data server, the current series of measurement data and hash values together with the signature can be added to a blockchain-like structure, to prevent further tampering
Summary
Ambient air pollution is one of the most widespread environmental hazards in urban settlements as it affects the population’s health all over the world. Current approaches for monitoring air pollution use expensive, stationary equipment, which limits the spatial resolutions of the measurements, making them relevant for macro-scale air quality mapping [3]. This type of system relies on the principle that a single node covers a large urban area and will retain the location of each measurement. The core of such solutions are high precision gas sensors that come with increased deployment and maintenance costs.
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