Towards trustworthy participatory sensing

Abstract

Grassroots Participatory Sensing empowers people to collect and share sensor data using mobile devices across many applications, spanning intelligent transportation, air quality monitoring and social networking. In this paper, we argue that the very openness of such a system makes it vulnerable to abuse by malicious users who may poison the information, collude to fabricate information, or launch Sybils to distort that information. We propose and implement a novel trusted platform module (TPM), or angel based system that addresses the problem of providing sensor data integrity. The key idea is to provide a trusted platform within each sensor device to attest the integrity of sensor readings. We argue that this localizes integrity checking to the device, rather than relying on corroboration, making the system not only simpler, but also resistant to collusion and data poisoning. A “burnedin” private key in the TPM prevents users from launching Sybils. We also make the case for content protection and access control mechanisms that enable users to publish sensor data streams to selected groups of people and address it using broadcast encryption techniques. 1