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SecBCS: a secure and privacy-preserving blockchain-based crowdsourcing system

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Abstract

A robust and scalable crowd management infrastructure is crucial in addressing operational challenges when deploying high-density sensors and actuators in a smart city. While crowdsourcing is widely used in crowd management, conventional solutions, such as Upwork and Amazon Mechanical Turk, generally depend on a trusted third-party platform. There exist several potential security concerns (e.g., sensitive leakage, single point of failure and unfair judgment) in such a centralized paradigm. Hence, a recent trend in crowdsourcing is to leverage blockchain (a decentralized ledger technology) to address some of the existing limitations. A small number of blockchain-based crowdsourcing systems (BCSs) with incentive mechanisms have been proposed in the literature, but they are generally not designed with security in mind. Thus, we study the security and privacy requirements of a secure BCS and propose a concrete solution (i.e., SecBCS) with a prototype implementation based on JUICE.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFC1604004), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61572379, 61772377, 61841701), and Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province of China (Grant Nos. 2017CFA007, 2015CFA068). The last author is supported by Cloud Technology Endowed Professorship. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and feedback which helped us to improve the content and presentation of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing, Ministry of Education, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Chao Lin & Debiao He

  2. State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P. O. Box 5159, Beijing, 100878, China

    Chao Lin & Debiao He

  3. College of Communication and Information, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA

    Sherali Zeadally

  4. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Thapar University, Patiala, 147004, India

    Neeraj Kumar

  5. Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, 78249, USA

    Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

Authors
  1. Chao Lin
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  2. Debiao He
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  3. Sherali Zeadally
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  4. Neeraj Kumar
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  5. Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
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Correspondence to Debiao He.

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Lin, C., He, D., Zeadally, S. et al. SecBCS: a secure and privacy-preserving blockchain-based crowdsourcing system. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 63, 130102 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9893-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-9893-2

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