Anonymity-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Reporting for Participatory Sensing

In this paper, we propose an efficient anonymous data reporting protocol for participatory sensing, which provide strong privacy protection, data accuracy, and generality. The protocol consists of two stages: 1) slot reservation and 2) message submission. In the slot reservation stage, a group of participants cooperate to assign each member a message slot in a vector which is essentially a message submission schedule, in such a manner that each participant’s slot is oblivious to other members and the application server. In the message submission stage, each participant transmits an encoded data to the application server based on the slot information known only to herself, in such a way that the application server cannot link a data to a specific participant. With such a data reporting protocol, the link between the data and the participants is broken, and as a result, participant’s privacy is protected. We conduct theoretical analysis of the correctness and anonymity of our protocol, as well as experiments to demonstrate the efficiency in small-scale applications with periodic data sampling.