Using blockchain to enhance the security of fog-assisted crowdsensing systems

Abstract

Recent years has witnessed a boom in fog-assisted crowdsensing, which exploits powerful sensing capabilities of various mobile devices or vehicles distributed in large-scale areas to efficiently gather information and make better decisions. However, the fog-assisted crowdsensing system is totally open, which provides the opportunity for malicious individuals or organizations to launch different attacks. In order to cope with the security threats from participants, a blockchain-based crowdsensing framework is proposed, which helps check the authentication of submitted sensor data and resists record tempering. Moreover, a bitcoin-based reward delivery scheme is designed to prevent requesters from denying payments. The sensing capability differences between users are considered in our design. Through security analysis and simulations evaluation, the performance superiority of the proposed framework and reward delivery scheme is demonstrated, in terms of malicious behaviour detection, user utility and sensor data quality.