Toward trustworthy mobile sensing

Abstract

Commodity mobile devices have been utilized as sensor nodes in a variety of domains, including citizen journalism, mobile social services, and domestic eldercare. In each of these domains, data integrity and device-owners' privacy are first-class concerns, but current approaches to secure sensing fail to balance these properties. External signing infrastructure cannot attest to the values generated by a device's sensing hardware, while trusted sensing hardware does not allow users to securely reduce the fidelity of readings in order to preserve their privacy. In this paper we examine the challenges posed by the potentially conflicting goals of data integrity and user privacy and propose a trustworthy mobile sensing platform which leverages inexpensive commodity Trusted Platform Module (TPM) hardware.