People-centric collective intelligence: decentralized and enhanced privacy mobile crowd sensing based on blockchain

Abstract

Smart phones have changed the way we interact with this world and our peers. They have not only become powerful, but they have become affordable. In this current day and age, smart phones are getting smarter with every subsequent iteration. Every aspect of today’s smart phones is far more efficient and powerful than the computers we had a few years back. Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is the recent attractive research area that follows the crowd’s basic principle wisdom. Complex tasks can be performed easily with (MCS) network using the enormous amount of human involvement and powerful mobile devices. Even though there are a plethora of options available to users in terms of services to choose from, the one thing that remains a concern is security, privacy & data breach. Mobile crowd sensing -centralized design approach can give a lot of durable services. However, the trust of centralized service providers cannot be assured within the real world, owing to the profit-driven facts of service providers, when the privacy policy goes into conflict with their profit, they’re most likely to perform dishonest work, going against the work ethics and even performing malicious activities for gaining more profit. The prime example is Mark Zuckerberg providing their Facebook User data to third parties for monetary benefits. Besides the emergence of assorted attacks, particularly for inner attacks, service providers cannot offer full protection for task information, attribution information, or collected knowledge. Therefore, a decentralized design approach for mobile crowd sensing is strongly required. This paper aims to design and implement a real-time privacy-preserving data aggregation distributed-scheme to mobile crowd sensing called SMARTEE. Our design uses elliptic curve-based Public Key Encryption and digital signature for data encryption and verification, which performs faster computations, uses less storage and employs a shorter key. The digital signature ensures integrity and privacy-preserving of the data. We incorporate blockchain technology with the traditional (MCS) to process and analyze obtained crowd sensed data that ensures automotive security and privacy. Our proposed architecture with the features of blockchain protects the user information's privacy and increases the security of the (MCS) environment.