Protecting Mobile Crowd Sensing against Sybil Attacks Using Cloud Based Trust Management System

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) arises as a new sensing paradigm, which leverages citizens for large-scale sensing by various mobile devices to efficiently collect and share local information. Unlike other MCS application challenges that consider user privacy and data trustworthiness, this study focuses on the network trustworthiness problem, namely, Sybil attacks in MCS network. The Sybil attack in computer security is a type of security attack, which illegally forges multiple identities in peer-to-peer networks, namely, Sybil identities. These Sybil identities will falsify multiple identities that negatively influence the effectiveness of sensing data in this MCS network or degrading entire network performance. To cope with this problem, a cloud based trust management scheme (CbTMS) was proposed to detect Sybil attacks in the MCS network. The CbTMS was proffered for performing active and passive checking scheme, in addition to the mobile PCS trustworthiness management, and includes a decision tree algorithm, to verify the covered nodes in the MCS network. Simulation studies show that our CbTMS can efficiently detect the malicious Sybil nodes in the network and cause 6.87 Wh power reduction compared with other malicious Sybil node attack mode.