LibTiP: a lightweight and robust scheme for data trustworthiness and privacy protection in participatory sensing

Abstract

Participatory sensing has been envisioned as a promising paradigm for rapidly sharing of environmental information by mobile smart phones that are always equipped with sensors. It invokes a large amount of mobile applications, e.g., participatory environmental monitoring, transportation and traffic management, and personal entertainments. As participators are usually volunteers, participatory sensing thus poses several fundamental security problems such as data trustworthiness, participator reputation evaluation, participator privacy protection and functional robustness against inner attacks or malicious participators. Although some schemes have already been proposed in recent years, none of them is able to solve the above problems in one solution, especially, in a lightweight manner. In this paper, we make the first attempt in this regard and propose a scheme called LibTip. We pinpoint and model several new attacks in participatory sensing that are launched from inner attackers such as bad-mouth attack and key leakage attack. The definitions for the security of the scheme are formally stated. The security and performance are thoroughly analysed or proved, which justifies the applicability of LibTip.