SPPEAR

Abstract

Recent advances in sensing, computing, and networking have paved the way for the emerging paradigm of participatory sensing (PS). The openness of such systems and the richness of user data they entail raise significant concerns for their security, privacy and resilience. Prior works addressed different aspects of the problem. But in order to reap the benefits of this new sensing paradigm, we need a comprehensive solution. That is, a secure and accountable PS system that preserves user privacy, and enables the provision of incentives to the participants. At the same time, we are after a PS system that is resilient to abusive users and guarantees privacy protection even against multiple misbehaving PS entities (servers). We address these seemingly contradicting requirements with our SPPEAR architecture. Our full blown implementation and experimental evaluation demonstrate that SPPEAR is efficient, practical, and scalable. Last but not least, we formally assess the achieved security and privacy properties. Overall, our system is a comprehensive solution that significantly extends the state-of-the-art and can catalyze the deployment of PS applications.