Privacy-Aware Edge Computing in Social Sensing Applications Using Ring Signatures

Abstract

Privacy on the Internet has become a major concern in recent years and is an ethical dilemma for Internet based applications. Social Sensing based Edge Computing (SSEC)is a category of distributed applications in which privately owned devices at the “edge” of the network participate in data collection and processing. Traditionally in SSEC, it has been difficult to manage privacy without making a tradeoff with performance or accuracy. In this paper, we present Privacy-aware Edge Computing (PEC), a framework that utilizes ring signatures for implementing social sensing applications with full privacy and without sacrificing data quality. Under PEC, privacy is managed by the edge devices without the need of a third party trusted authority. We evaluate the performance of PEC on a realworld edge computing platform and through extensive simulation studies. The results demonstrate that PEC achieves a high level of anonymity with a constrained cryptographic overhead.