The Project

Participatory Sensing combines the ubiquity of mobile phones with sensing capabilities of Wireless Sensor Networks. It targets pervasive collection of information, e.g., temperature, traffic conditions, or health-related data. As users produce measurements from their mobile devices, voluntary participation becomes essential. However, a number of privacy concerns -- due to the personal information conveyed by data reports -- hinder large-scale deployment of participatory sensing applications. Prior work on privacy protection, for participatory sensing, has often relayed on unrealistic assumptions and with no provably-secure guarantees.

The goal of this project is to introduce PEPSI: a Privacy-Enhanced Participatory Sensing Infrastructure. We explore realistic architectural assumptions and a minimal set of (formal) privacy requirements, aiming at protecting privacy of both data producers and consumers. We design a solution that attains privacy guarantees with provable security at very low additional computational cost and almost no extra communication overhead.

People

Emiliano De Cristofaro (UC Irvine / PARC)
Claudio Soriente (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid)

Publications

• E. De Cristofaro, C. Soriente. PEPSI: Privacy-Enhancing Participatory Sensing Infrastructure. Proceedings of ACM WiSec 2011.
  Extended version is available here.
  
• E. De Cristofaro, C.Soriente. Participatory Privacy: Enabling Privacy in Participatory Sensing. To Appear in IEEE Network -- July 2012 Issue.
  Submitted March 2011, Accepted January 2012.
  Preliminary version available here.

Funding Grants and Acknowledgments

This research has been partially funded by US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) under grant FA8750-09-2-0071, the Madrid Regional Council -- CAM under project CLOUDS (S2009TIC-1692), the Spanish Research Agency -- MICINN under project CloudStorm (TIN2010-19077), and the European Commission under projects MASSIF (FP7-257475) and STREAM (FP7-216181).
We are also very grateful to Nokia and RIM for donating mobile devices used in our experiments.