AI-based Security Design of Mobile Crowdsensing Systems: Review, Challenges and Case Studies

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a distributed sensing paradigm that uses a variety of built-in sensors in smart mobile devices to enable ubiquitous acquisition of sensory data from surroundings. However, non-dedicated nature of MCS results in vulnerabilities in the presence of malicious participants to compromise the availability of the MCS components, particularly the servers and participants' devices. In this paper, we focus on Denial of Service attacks in MCS where malicious participants submit illegitimate task requests to the MCS platform to keep MCS servers busy while having sensing devices expend energy needlessly. After reviewing Artificial Intelligence-based security solutions for MCS systems, we focus on a typical location-based and energy-oriented DoS attack, and present a security solution that applies ensemble techniques in machine learning to identify illegitimate tasks and prevent personal devices from pointless energy consumption so as to improve the availability of the whole system. Through simulations, we show that ensemble techniques are capable of identifying illegitimate and legitimate tasks while gradient boosting appears to be a preferable solution with an AUC performance higher than 0.88 in the precision-recall curve. We also investigate the impact of environmental settings on the detection performance so as to provide a clearer understanding of the model. Our performance results show that MCS task legitimacy decisions with high F-scores are possible for both illegitimate and legitimate tasks.