Skip to main content
Article
BLIND: A Privacy Preserving Truth Discovery System For Mobile Crowdsensing
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
  • Vincenzo Agate
  • Pierluca Ferraro
  • Giuseppe Lo Re
  • Sajal K. Das, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Abstract

Nowadays, an increasing number of applications exploit users who act as intelligent sensors and can quickly provide high-level information. These users generate valuable data that, if mishandled, could potentially reveal sensitive information. Protecting user privacy is thus of paramount importance for crowdsensing systems. In this paper, we propose BLIND, an innovative open-source truth discovery system designed to improve the quality of information (QoI) through the use of privacy-preserving computation techniques in mobile crowdsensing scenarios. The uniqueness of BLIND lies in its ability to preserve user privacy by ensuring that none of the parties involved are able to identify the source of the information provided. The system uses homomorphic encryption to implement a novel privacy-preserving version of the well-known K-Means clustering algorithm, which directly groups encrypted user data. Outliers are then removed privately without revealing any useful information to the parties involved. We extensively evaluate the proposed system for both server-side and client-side scalability, as well as truth discovery accuracy, using a real-world dataset and a synthetic one, to test the system under challenging conditions. Comparisons with four state-of-the-art approaches show that BLIND optimizes QoI by effectively mitigating the impact of four different security attacks, with higher accuracy and lower communication overhead than its competitors. With the optimizations proposed in this paper, BLIND is up to three times faster than the baseline system, and the obtained Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) values are up to 42% lower than other state-of-the-art approaches.

Department(s)
Computer Science
Comments
National Science Foundation, Grant CNS-1818942
Keywords and Phrases
  • Mobile crowdsensing,
  • Privacy-preserving computation,
  • QoI,
  • Truth discovery
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2024 Elsevier, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
3-1-2024
Publication Date
01 Mar 2024
Disciplines
Citation Information
Vincenzo Agate, Pierluca Ferraro, Giuseppe Lo Re and Sajal K. Das. "BLIND: A Privacy Preserving Truth Discovery System For Mobile Crowdsensing" Journal of Network and Computer Applications Vol. 223 (2024) ISSN: 1095-8592; 1084-8045
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sajal-das/332/