A Blockchain-based privacy preserving mechanism for mobile crowdsensing

Abstract

In blockchain-based mobile crowdsensing, reporting of real-time data is stored on a public blockchain in which the address of every user/node is public. Now, the problem lies in the fact that if their addresses get shown to adversaries, all their transactions history is also going to be revealed. Therefore, crowdsensing demands a little privacy preservation strategy in which the identity of a user is unable to be revealed to an adversary or we can say that crowd sensors while reporting the real-time data must provide some level of anonymity to crowdsensing users/nodes [1]. The current crowdsensing architecture is not secure because of its centralized nature and the reason is a single point of failure also numerous kinds of attacks are possible by adversaries such as linkage attacks, Sybil attacks, and DDOS attacks to get the identity or any other valuable information about the nodes. The location of crowd sensors is also a threat that could lead to adversarial attacks. Consequently, some blockchain-based models must be proposed to attain privacy on the blockchain ledger. The solution can either be made up crowdsensing environment on a private blockchain or smart contracts may be the answer to this problem by which we can make the users secure from several attacks conducted by adversaries on the blockchain.