SenseCrypt: A Security Framework for Mobile Crowd Sensing Applications

The proliferation of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets with embedded sensors and communication features has led to the introduction of a novel sensing paradigm called mobile crowd sensing. Despite its opportunities and advantages over traditional wireless sensor networks, mobile crowd sensing still faces security and privacy issues, among other challenges. Specifically, the security and privacy of sensitive location information of users remain lingering issues, considering the “on” and “off” state of global positioning system sensor in smartphones. To address this problem, this paper proposes “SenseCrypt”, a framework that automatically annotates and signcrypts sensitive location information of mobile crowd sensing users. The framework relies on K-means algorithm and a certificateless aggregate signcryption scheme (CLASC). It incorporates spatial coding as the data compression technique and message query telemetry transport as the messaging protocol. Results presented in this paper show that the proposed framework incurs low computational cost and communication overhead. Also, the framework is robust against privileged insider attack, replay and forgery attacks. Confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation are security services offered by the proposed framework.