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Towards secure and truthful task assignment in spatial crowdsourcing

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Abstract

The ubiquity of mobile device and wireless networks flourishes the market of spatial crowdsourcing, in which location constrained tasks are sent to workers and expected to be performed in some designated locations. To obtain a global optimal task assignment scheme, the platform usually needs to collect location information of all workers. During this process, there is a significant security concern, that is, the platform may not be trustworthy, so it brings about a threat to workers location privacy. In this paper, to tackle the privacy-preserving task assignment problem, we propose a privacy-preserving reverse auction based assignment model which consists of two key parts. In the first part, we generalize private location to travel cost and protect it by an anonymity based data aggregation protocol. In the second part, we propose a reverse auction task assignment algorithm, which is a truthful incentive mechanism, to encourage workers to offer authentic data. We theoretically show that the proposed model is secure against semi-honest adversaries. Experimental results show that our model is efficient and can scale to real SC applications.

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Acknowledgements

Research reported in this publication was partially supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61572336, 61632016, 61572335), and the Natural Science Research Project of Jiangsu Higher Education Institution (Grant No. 18KJA520010).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology & Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Soochow University, Suzhou, China

    Dongjun Zhai, Yue Sun, An Liu, Zhixu Li & Lei Zhao

  2. Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2122, Australia

    Guanfeng Liu

  3. Big Data Research Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Kai Zheng

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  1. Dongjun Zhai
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  2. Yue Sun
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Correspondence to An Liu.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Web Information Systems Engineering 2017

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Zhai, D., Sun, Y., Liu, A. et al. Towards secure and truthful task assignment in spatial crowdsourcing. World Wide Web 22, 2017–2040 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-018-0638-2

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