Privacy assurance in mobile sensing networks: Go beyond trusted servers

—Mobile devices are becoming the largest sensor network around the world. They could be used to collect a large amount of data with little effort and cost which is leading to a promising future for participatory sensing networks or urban sensing. However, privacy concerns of the mobile users are the major inhibitors hindering massive participation. This paper proposes a solution to user privacy preserving problem in a participatory sensing network. Each user is considered as a node in a social network and users are connected through friendship links which are represented as edges on the network. Typically, each user contributes to the participatory system by uploading his/her acquired data to a server. Instead of uploading data to the server directly, we devised a Hot-PotatoPrivacy-Protection Algorithm (HP3 ) in which data is sent to one of the friends of the user and the friend will choose another friend to deliver the data to the next hop. Hopping goes on until some user-defined t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PERCOM
• Authors: Ling Hu, Cyrus Shahabi
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Mobile Users, Participatory Sensing Network, PERCOM 2010, User