Consent-driven Data Reuse in Multi-tasking Crowdsensing Systems: A Privacy-by-Design Solution

Mobile crowdsensing allows gathering massive data across time and space to feed our environmental knowledge, and to link such knowledge to user behavior. However, a major challenge facing mobile crowdsensing is to guarantee privacy preservation to the contributing users. Privacy preservation in crowdsensing systems has led to two main approaches, sometimes combined, which are, respectively, to trade privacy for rewards, and to take advantage of privacy-enhancing technologies anonymizingthe collected data. Although relevant, we claim that these approaches do not sufficiently take into account the users' own tolerance to the use of the data provided, so that the crowdsensing system guarantees users the expected level of confidentiality as well as fosters the use of crowdsensing data for different tasks. To this end, we leverage the l-Completeness property, which ensures that the data provided can be used for all the tasks to which their owners consent as long as they are analyzed with l - 1 other sources, and that no privacy violations can occur due to the related contribution of users with less stringent privacy requirements. The challenge, therefore, is to ensure l-Completeness when analyzing the data while allowing the data to be used for as many tasks as possible, and promoting the accuracy of the resulting knowledge. This is achieved through a clustering algorithm sensitive to the data distribution, which optimizes data reuse and utility. Nevertheless, it is critical to allow the deployment of such a solution even in the presence of a malicious adversary able to act on the server side, for which we introduce a privacy-by-design architecture leveraging Trusted Execution Environments. The implementation of a prototype using SGX enclaves further allows running experiments that show that our system incurs a reasonable performance overhead, while providing strong security properties against a malicious adversary. (C) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Privacy preservation in mobile crowdsensing systems is a major challenge, with current approaches not adequately taking into account users' tolerance for data usage.