Security Threats Faced by Spatial Crowdsourcing systems: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Spatial crowdsourcing (SC) is an emerging crowdsourcing paradigm that uses traditional crowdsourcing principles to perform spatiotemporal tasks. The conventional crowdsourcing model follows a highly centralized architecture, as human involvement is the core of any crowdsourcing activity; it suffers from a severe lack of quality control along with far-reaching security implications. Hence, we work to identify the security challenges that accurately express the essence of a spatial crowdsourcing network. Furthermore, we set forth a general architecture to better understand the problems that stem from centralization in this crowdsourcing paradigm. Lastly, we draw some possible future research problems, as we expect our work to raise awareness, allowing other researchers to probe further regarding security in spatial crowdsourcing.