Detecting Fake Mobile Crowdsensing Tasks: Ensemble Methods Under Limited Data

The nondedicated sensing capabilities of smart mobile devices contribute to Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems with integral building blocks called mobile crowdsensing (MCS) systems. The distributed and nontrusted nature of MCS systems leads to various threats for devices and MCS platforms as well as for end users. Out of the many threats, fake tasks may lead to drained resources at the participating devices and clogged resources at the MCS platforms. Furthermore, when limited data are available, it becomes a further challenge to identify maliciously submitted fake tasks. In this article, we introduce possible solutions that leverage ensemble learning against fake tasks submitted to MCS platforms. More specifically, boosting-based solutions, namely adaptive boosting for binary classification (AdaBoost), gentle adaptive boosting (GentleBoost), and random under-sampling boosting (RUSBoost), form the basis for learning the legitimacy of tasks submitted to MCS platforms. Over a six-day observation window, one day was used for training while the remaining five days were used for testing to evaluate the performance under limited data in terms of training the machine learning (ML) models. Through extensive simulations, we have shown that GentleBoostbased ensemble learning can achieve promising performance in detecting fake/illegitimate tasks submitted to an MCS platform.