AnonySense: A system for anonymous opportunistic sensing

We describe AnonySense, a privacy-aware system for realizing pervasive applications based on collaborative, opportunistic sensing by personal mobile devices. AnonySense allows applications to submit sensing tasks to be distributed across participating mobile devices, later receiving verified, yet anonymized, sensor data reports back from the field, thus providing the first secure implementation of this participatory sensing model. We describe our security goals, threat model, and the architecture and protocols of AnonySense. We also describe how AnonySense can support extended security features that can be useful for different applications. We evaluate the security and feasibility of AnonySense through security analysis and prototype implementation. We show the feasibility of our approach through two plausible applications: a Wi-Fi rogue access point detector and a lost-object finder. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.