Pseudonym-based Privacy Protection Scheme for Participatory Sensing with Incentives

Participatory sensing applications rely on recruiting appropriate participants to share their surrounding conditions with others, and have been widely used in many areas like environmental monitoring, health care, and traffic congestion monitoring, etc. In such applications, how to ensure the privacy of a participant is important, since incentive mechanisms are used to maintain their enthusiasm for sustainable participation by offering certain amount of reward. In this paper, we propose a pseudonym-based privacy protection scheme, that takes both privacy protection and user incentives into consideration. The proposed scheme uses the pseudonym mechanism and one-way hash function to achieve user incentives, while protecting their identity. We also show extensive analysis of the proposed scheme to demonstrate that it can meet the security and performance the requirement of a participatory sensing application.