Leveraging Mobile Nodes for Preserving Node Privacy in Mobile Crowd Sensing

Abstract

Mobile crowd sensing has been a very important paradigm for collecting sensing data from a large number of mobile nodes dispersed over a wide area. Although it provides a powerful means for sensing data collection, mobile nodes are subject to privacy leakage risks since the sensing data from a mobile node may contain sensitive information about the sensor node such as physical locations. Therefore, it is essential for mobile crowd sensing to have a privacy preserving scheme to protect the privacy of mobile nodes. A number of approaches have been proposed for preserving node privacy in mobile crowd sensing. Many of the existing approaches manipulate the sensing data so that attackers could not obtain the privacy-sensitive data. The main drawback of these approaches is that the manipulated data have a lower utility in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose an approach called P3 to preserve the privacy of the mobile nodes in a mobile crowd sensing system, leveraging node mobility. In essence, a mobile node determines a routing path that consists of a sequence of intermediate mobile nodes and then forwards the sensing data along the routing path. By using asymmetric encryptions, it is ensured that a malicious node is not able to determine the source nodes by tracing back along the path. With our approach, upper-layer applications are able to access the original sensing data from mobile nodes, while the privacy of the mobile node is not compromised. Our theoretical analysis shows that the proposed approach achieves a high level of privacy preserving capability. The simulation results also show that the proposed approach incurs only modest overhead.