Poisoning Attack Anticipation in Mobile Crowdsensing: A Competitive Learning-Based Study

Mobile Crowdsensing is prone to adversarial attacks particularly the data injection attacks to mislead the servers in the decision-making process. This paper aims to tackle the problem of threat anticipation from the standpoint of data poisoning attacks, and aims to model various classifiers to model the behaviour of the adversaries in a Mobile Crowdsensing setting. To this end, we study and quantify the impact of competitive learning-based data poisoning in a Mobile Crowdsensing environment by considering a black-box attack through a self organizing map. Under various machine learning classifiers in the decision-making platforms, it has been shown that the accuracy of the crowdsensing platform decisions are prone to a decrease in the range of 18%-22% when an adversary pursues a competitive learning-based data poisoning attack on the crowdsensing platform. Furthermore, we also show the robustness of certain classifiers under increasing poisoned samples.