Privacy-preserving verifiable data aggregation and analysis for cloud-assisted mobile crowdsourcing

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a crowd-based outsourcing, where a requester (task owner) can outsource tasks to workers (public crowd). Recently, mobile crowdsourcing, which can leverage workers' data from smartphones for data aggregation and analysis, has attracted much attention. However, when the data volume is getting large, it becomes a difficult problem for a requester to aggregate and analyze the incoming data, especially when the requester is an ordinary smartphone user or a start-up company with limited storage and computation resources. Besides, workers are concerned about their identity and data privacy. To tackle these issues, we introduce a three-party architecture for mobile crowdsourcing, where the cloud is implemented between workers and requesters to ease the storage and computation burden of the resource-limited requester. Identity privacy and data privacy are also achieved. With our scheme, a requester is able to verify the correctness of computation results from the cloud. We also provide several aggregated statistics in our work, together with efficient data update methods. Extensive simulation shows both the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed solution.