Section: New Results

Mobile Participatory Sensing with Strong Privacy Guarantees (Axis 3)

Participant : Iulian Sandu Popa [correspondent] .

Mobile participatory sensing could be used in many applications such as vehicular traffic monitoring, pollution tracking, or even health surveying. However, its success depends on finding a solution for querying large numbers of smart phones or vehicular systems, which protects user location privacy and works in real-time. This work proposes PAMPAS, a privacy-aware mobile distributed system for efficient data aggregation in mobile participatory sensing. In PAMPAS, mobile devices enhanced with secure hardware, called secure probes (SPs), perform distributed query processing, while preventing users from accessing other users' data. A supporting server infrastructure (SSI) coordinates the inter-SP communication and the computation tasks executed on SPs. PAMPAS ensures that SSI cannot link the location reported by SPs to the user identities even if SSI has additional background information. Moreover, we propose an enhanced version of the protocol, named PAMPAS⁺, to make the system robust even against advanced hardware attacks on the SPs. Hence, the user location privacy leakage remains very low even for an attacker controlling the SSI and a few corrupted SPs. The leakage is proportional with the number of corrupted SPs and thus requires a massive SP corruption to break the system, which is extremely unlikely in practice. This work has been accomplished in collaboration with NJIT (see Section 9.2.1.1) and has been recently submitted as a journal paper.