Anonymous Authentication on Trust in Blockchain-Based Mobile Crowdsourcing

Mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) has become an effective data collection method due to its mobility, low cost, and flexibility. However, since centralized MCS confronts severe security and privacy risks in reality, many researchers are devoted to building a decentralized MCS system based on blockchain. Despite the effectiveness of these schemes, they fail to offer anonymous authentication on the trust of MCS nodes, although privacy is a main concern in MCS and trust plays an important role in a series of MCS activities, such as worker selection and truth discovery. Nevertheless, anonymous authentication on trust is not a trivial issue since trust evaluation usually conflicts with anonymity, which is a necessary privacy requirement in an open MCS environment. To tackle this problem, we leverage Intel software guard extension (SGX) and propose a scheme to anonymously authenticate trust with trustworthy trust evaluation in a blockchain-based MCS system. The scheme employs an SGX-enabled cloud server to periodically alter user public/private key pairs and mix newly altered keys among a number of faked keys in order to ensure unlinkability. Besides, we consider the unique features of MCS and work out a novel trust evaluation method by aggregating both subjective feedback and objective behaviors. Finally, we conduct several analyses and experiments to illustrate its security and efficiency.

Automated summary

Mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) is an effective data collection method, but centralized MCS faces security and privacy risks. Researchers propose a decentralized MCS system based on blockchain, but they lack anonymous authentication on trust. To address this, we propose a scheme using Intel software guard extension (SGX) to anonymously authenticate trust in a blockchain-based MCS system, considering the unique features of MCS and aggregating subjective feedback and objective behaviors for trust evaluation.