PAMPAS: Privacy-Aware Mobile Participatory Sensing Using Secure Probes

Mobile participatory sensing could be used in many applications such as vehicular traffic monitoring, pollution tracking, or even health surveying. However, its success depends on finding a solution for querying large numbers of users which protects user location privacy and works in real-time. This paper presents PAMPAS, a privacy-aware mobile distributed system for efficient data aggregation in mobile participatory sensing. In PAMPAS, mobile devices enhanced with secure hardware, called secure probes (SPs), perform distributed query processing, while preventing users from accessing other users' data. A supporting server infrastructure (SSI) coordinates the inter-SP communication and the computation tasks executed on SPs. PAMPAS ensures that SSI cannot link the location reported by SPs to the user identities even if SSI has additional background information. In addition to its novel system architecture, PAMPAS also proposes two new protocols for privacy-aware location-based aggregation and adaptive spatial partitioning of SPs that work efficiently on resource-constrained SPs. Our experimental results and security analysis demonstrate that these protocols are able to collect the data, aggregate them, and share statistics or derived models in real-time, without any location privacy leakage.