Location Privacy-Preserving Method for Auction-Based Incentive Mechanisms in Mobile Crowd Sensing

Abstract

It is of significant importance to provide incentives to smartphone users in mobile crowd sensing systems. Recently, a number of auction-based incentive mechanisms have been proposed. However, an auction-based incentive mechanism may unexpectedly release the location privacy of smartphone users, which may seriously reduce the willingness of users participating in contributing sensing data. In an auction-based incentive mechanism, even if the location of a user is not enclosed in his/her bid submitted to the platform, the location information may still be inferred by an adversary by using the prices of the tasks required by the user. We take an example to show how an attack can recover the location information of a smartphone user by merely knowing his/her bid. To defend against such an attack, we propose a method to protect location privacy in auctions for mobile crowd sensing systems. This method encrypts prices in a bid so that the adversary cannot access and hence the location privacy of users can be protected. In the meanwhile, however, the auction can proceed properly, i.e. the platform can select the user offering the lowest price for each sensing task or the platform can choose users with budget constraint. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method with theoretical analysis and simulations.