Privacy-preserving Authentication in Participatory Sensing Systems : An attribute based authentication solution with sensor requirement enforcement.

Sammanfattning: Participatory Sensing Systems (PSS) are a type of Mobile Crowdsensing System where users voluntarily participate in contributing information. Task initiators create tasks, targeting specific data that needs to be gathered by the users’ device sensors. Such systems have been designed with different requirements, such as data trustworthiness, accountability, and incentives, in a secure and private way. However, it is complex to protect user privacy without affecting the performance of the rest of the system. For example, with task assignment, either the user authenticates anonymously, or discloses its sensors for an efficient allocation. If the user identity is hidden from the system, it could receive a task it cannot perform. This thesis aims to design an anonymous authentication model for PSS based on privacy-preserving attribute-based signatures. The proposed solution allows the Participatory Sensing System to enforce sensor requirements for efficient task allocation. In addition to the design, experiments measuring the performance of the operations are included in the thesis, to prove it is suitable for real-world scenarios.