A Location Based Privacy Preserving Task Allocation Mechanism in Mobile Crowdsourcing

Driven by the proliferation of the mobile devices, Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) has become an efficient approach for large-scale and low-cost data collection. However, new privacy concerns have arisen in MCS, particularly regarding the leakage of sensitive location information of users. The privacy of location must be protected from being leaked to third parties in order to defend against the attacks launched by adversaries, such as location inference or tracking. To address these challenges, we propose a Location based Privacy Preserving Task Allocation (LP2TA) mechanism that ensures the secure task dissemination during the user recruitment. LP2TA integrates the dual-trapdoor cryptographic algorithm with the geographic location factors, and only the users who are at specified location can successfully decrypt task information. The security analysis and simulation results demonstrate that LP2TA provides the strong location privacy preservation and has the low computational overhead.