{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,18]],"date-time":"2026-04-18T21:43:48Z","timestamp":1776548628764,"version":"3.51.2"},"reference-count":61,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"11","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,9]],"date-time":"2020-06-09T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1591660800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The proliferation of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets with embedded sensors and communication features has led to the introduction of a novel sensing paradigm called mobile crowd sensing. Despite its opportunities and advantages over traditional wireless sensor networks, mobile crowd sensing still faces security and privacy issues, among other challenges. Specifically, the security and privacy of sensitive location information of users remain lingering issues, considering the \u201con\u201d and \u201coff\u201d state of global positioning system sensor in smartphones. To address this problem, this paper proposes \u201cSenseCrypt\u201d, a framework that automatically annotates and signcrypts sensitive location information of mobile crowd sensing users. The framework relies on K-means algorithm and a certificateless aggregate signcryption scheme (CLASC). It incorporates spatial coding as the data compression technique and message query telemetry transport as the messaging protocol. Results presented in this paper show that the proposed framework incurs low computational cost and communication overhead. Also, the framework is robust against privileged insider attack, replay and forgery attacks. Confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation are security services offered by the proposed framework.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s20113280","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,9]],"date-time":"2020-06-09T06:34:16Z","timestamp":1591684456000},"page":"3280","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":18,"title":["SenseCrypt: A Security Framework for Mobile Crowd Sensing Applications"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"20","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4840-9345","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nsikak","family":"Pius Owoh","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang 11800, Malaysia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8081-5223","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Manmeet","family":"Mahinderjit Singh","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang 11800, Malaysia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Distefano, S., Longo, F., and Scarpa, M. (2013, January 3\u20138). Investigating mobile crowdsensing application performance. Proceedings of the Third ACM International Symposium on Design And Analysis of Intelligent Vehicular Networks and Applications, Barcelona, Spain.","DOI":"10.1145\/2512921.2512931"},{"key":"ref_2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"32","DOI":"10.1109\/MCOM.2011.6069707","article-title":"Mobile crowdsensing: Current state and future challenges","volume":"49","author":"Ganti","year":"2011","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Mag."},{"key":"ref_3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"140","DOI":"10.1109\/MCOM.2010.5560598","article-title":"A survey of mobile phone sensing","volume":"48","author":"Lane","year":"2010","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Mag."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1928","DOI":"10.1016\/j.jss.2011.06.073","article-title":"A survey on privacy in mobile participatory sensing applications","volume":"84","author":"Christin","year":"2011","journal-title":"J. Syst. Softw."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"17292","DOI":"10.3390\/s131217292","article-title":"Mobile sensing systems","volume":"13","author":"Macias","year":"2013","journal-title":"Sensors"},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"Ma, S., Zheng, Y., and Wolfson, O. (2013, January 8\u201312). T-share: A large-scale dynamic taxi ridesharing service. Proceedings of the IEEE 29th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Brisbane, Australia."},{"key":"ref_7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"402","DOI":"10.1109\/SURV.2012.031412.00077","article-title":"Mobile phone sensing systems: A survey","volume":"15","author":"Khan","year":"2013","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"7","DOI":"10.1145\/2794400","article-title":"Mobile crowd sensing and computing: The review of an emerging human-powered sensing paradigm","volume":"48","author":"Guo","year":"2015","journal-title":"ACM Comput. Surv."},{"key":"ref_9","unstructured":"Tsung-Te Lai, T., Lin, C.-Y., Su, Y.-Y., and Chu, H.-H. (2011, January 1\u20134). BikeTrack: Tracking stolen bikes through everyday mobile phones and participatory sensing. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Sensing Applications on Mobile Phones (PhoneSense), Seattle, WA, USA."},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Leonardi, C., Cappellotto, A., Caraviello, M., Lepri, B., and Antonelli, F. (2014, January 26\u201330). SecondNose: An air quality mobile crowdsensing system. Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational, Helsinki, Finland.","DOI":"10.1145\/2639189.2670273"},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"28","DOI":"10.1109\/MWC.2015.7054716","article-title":"User privacy and data trustworthiness in mobile crowd sensing","volume":"22","author":"He","year":"2015","journal-title":"IEEE Wirel. Commun."},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"42","DOI":"10.1109\/MCOM.2014.6871668","article-title":"4W1H in mobile crowd sensing","volume":"52","author":"Zhang","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Mag."},{"key":"ref_13","unstructured":"Owoh, N.P., and Singh, M.M. (2018). Security analysis of mobile crowd sensing applications. Appl. Comput. Inform., 1\u201311."},{"key":"ref_14","first-page":"1","article-title":"Mobile crowd sensing","volume":"6","author":"Talasila","year":"2015","journal-title":"Google Sch."},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Jin, H., Su, L., Xiao, H., and Nahrstedt, K. (2016, January 21\u201325). nception: Incentivizing privacy-preserving data aggregation for mobile crowd sensing systems. Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, Paderborn, Germany.","DOI":"10.1145\/2942358.2942375"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"29","DOI":"10.1109\/MCOM.2014.6871666","article-title":"Opportunities in mobile crowd sensing","volume":"52","author":"Ma","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Mag."},{"key":"ref_17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Radu, V., Lane, N.D., Bhattacharya, S., Mascolo, C., Marina, M.K., and Kawsar, F. (2016, January 12\u201316). Towards multimodal deep learning for activity recognition on mobile devices. Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct, Heidelberg, Germany.","DOI":"10.1145\/2968219.2971461"},{"key":"ref_18","unstructured":"Hammerla, N.Y., Halloran, S., and Ploetz, T. (2016). Deep, convolutional, and recurrent models for human activity recognition using wearables. arXiv."},{"key":"ref_19","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"235","DOI":"10.1016\/j.eswa.2016.04.032","article-title":"Human activity recognition with smartphone sensors using deep learning neural networks","volume":"59","author":"Ronao","year":"2016","journal-title":"Expert Syst. Appl."},{"key":"ref_20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ord\u00f3\u00f1ez, F.J., and Roggen, D. (2016). Deep convolutional and lstm recurrent neural networks for multimodal wearable activity recognition. Sensors, 16.","DOI":"10.3390\/s16010115"},{"key":"ref_21","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Pius Owoh, N., Mahinderjit Singh, M., and Zaaba, Z.F. (2018). Automatic Annotation of Unlabeled Data from Smartphone-Based Motion and Location Sensors. Sensors, 18.","DOI":"10.3390\/s18072134"},{"key":"ref_22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Guo, B., Yu, Z., Zhou, X., and Zhang, D. (2014, January 24\u201328). From participatory sensing to mobile crowd sensing. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), Budapest, Hungary.","DOI":"10.1109\/PerComW.2014.6815273"},{"key":"ref_23","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Das, T., Mohan, P., Padmanabhan, V.N., Ramjee, R., and Sharma, A. (2010, January 15\u201318). PRISM: Platform for remote sensing using smartphones. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, San Francisco, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1145\/1814433.1814442"},{"key":"ref_24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"16","DOI":"10.1016\/j.pmcj.2010.04.001","article-title":"AnonySense: A system for anonymous opportunistic sensing","volume":"7","author":"Shin","year":"2011","journal-title":"Pervasive Mob. Comput."},{"key":"ref_25","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2021","DOI":"10.1109\/TIFS.2013.2287092","article-title":"Extended capabilities for a privacy-enhanced participatory sensing infrastructure (PEPSI)","volume":"8","author":"Soriente","year":"2013","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur."},{"key":"ref_26","first-page":"4410","article-title":"Invisible hand: A privacy preserving mobile crowd sensing framework based on economic models","volume":"66","author":"Liu","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol."},{"key":"ref_27","first-page":"276","article-title":"Certificateless aggregate signcryption: Security model and a concrete construction secure in the random oracle model","volume":"26","author":"Eslami","year":"2014","journal-title":"J. King Saud Univ. Comput. Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_28","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"772","DOI":"10.1109\/JIOT.2017.2666783","article-title":"A privacy-preserving vehicular crowdsensing-based road surface condition monitoring system using fog computing","volume":"4","author":"Basudan","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Internet Things J."},{"key":"ref_29","unstructured":"Andersen, M.S. (2011, January 12\u201315). On limitations of existing methods for location privacy. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Spontaneous Interaction and Mobile Phone Use, San Francisco, CA, USA."},{"key":"ref_30","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Alswailim, M.A., Zulkernine, M., and Hassanein, H.S. (2014, January 8\u201311). Classification of participatory sensing privacy schemes. Proceedings of the 39th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks Workshops, Edmonton, AB, Canada.","DOI":"10.1109\/LCNW.2014.6927732"},{"key":"ref_31","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"557","DOI":"10.1142\/S0218488502001648","article-title":"A model for protecting privacy","volume":"10","author":"Sweeney","year":"2002","journal-title":"Int. J. Uncertain. Fuzziness Knowl. Based Syst."},{"key":"ref_32","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Huang, K.L., Kanhere, S.S., and Hu, W. (2012, January 22\u201325). A privacy-preserving reputation system for participatory sensing. Proceedings of the 37th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, Clearwater Beach, FL, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/LCN.2012.6423585"},{"key":"ref_33","first-page":"1","article-title":"Privacy for location-based services","volume":"4","author":"Ghinita","year":"2013","journal-title":"Synth. Lect. Inf. Secur. Priv. Trust"},{"key":"ref_34","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"43","DOI":"10.1145\/2031331.2031337","article-title":"A privacy-aware framework for participatory sensing","volume":"13","author":"Kazemi","year":"2011","journal-title":"ACM SIGKDD Explor. Newsl."},{"key":"ref_35","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Freudiger, J., Manshaei, M.H., Le Boudec, J.-Y., and Hubaux, J.-P. (2010, January 14\u201319). On the age of pseudonyms in mobile ad hoc networks. Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM, San Diego, CA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/INFCOM.2010.5461975"},{"key":"ref_36","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ma, P., Tao, D., and Wu, T. (2017, January 10\u201311). A pseudonym based anonymous identity authentication mechanism for mobile crowd sensing. Proceedings of the 2017 3rd International Conference on Big Data Computing and Communications (BIGCOM), Chengdu, China.","DOI":"10.1109\/BIGCOM.2017.11"},{"key":"ref_37","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Andr\u00e9s, M.E., Bordenabe, N.E., Chatzikokolakis, K., and Palamidessi, C. (2012). Geo-indistinguishability: Differential privacy for location-based systems. arXiv.","DOI":"10.1145\/2508859.2516735"},{"key":"ref_38","unstructured":"Dwork, C. (2009, January 15\u201317). The differential privacy frontier. Proceedings of the Theory of Cryptography Conference, San Francisco, CA, USA."},{"key":"ref_39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wang, L., Zhang, D., Yang, D., Lim, B.Y., and Ma, X. (2016, January 12\u201315). Differential location privacy for sparse mobile crowdsensing. Proceedings of the IEEE 16th International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Barcelona, Spain.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICDM.2016.0169"},{"key":"ref_40","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1330","DOI":"10.1109\/TMC.2018.2861393","article-title":"Personalized privacy-preserving task allocation for mobile crowdsensing","volume":"18","author":"Wang","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput."},{"key":"ref_41","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"7123","DOI":"10.1109\/TVT.2017.2674976","article-title":"Joint transceiver and power splitting optimization for multiuser MIMO SWIPT under MSE QoS constraints","volume":"66","author":"Zhang","year":"2017","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol."},{"key":"ref_42","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Miao, C., Jiang, W., Su, L., Li, Y., Guo, S., Qin, Z., Xiao, H., Gao, J., and Ren, K. (2015, January 1\u20134). Cloud-enabled privacy-preserving truth discovery in crowd sensing systems. Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Seoul, Korea.","DOI":"10.1145\/2809695.2809719"},{"key":"ref_43","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Miao, C., Su, L., Jiang, W., Li, Y., and Tian, M. (2017, January 1\u20134). A lightweight privacy-preserving truth discovery framework for mobile crowd sensing systems. Proceedings of the IEEE INFOCOM 2017-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, Atlanta, GA, USA.","DOI":"10.1109\/INFOCOM.2017.8057114"},{"key":"ref_44","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2475","DOI":"10.1109\/TIFS.2018.2819134","article-title":"Learning the truth privately and confidently: Encrypted confidence-aware truth discovery in mobile crowdsensing","volume":"13","author":"Zheng","year":"2018","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur."},{"key":"ref_45","unstructured":"Al-Riyami, S.S., and Paterson, K.G. (2019, January 8\u201312). Certificateless public key cryptography. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, Kobe, Japan."},{"key":"ref_46","unstructured":"Zheng, Y. (2019, January 21\u201324). Signcryption and its applications in efficient public key solutions. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Information Security, Jeju Island, South Korea."},{"key":"ref_47","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Barbosa, M., and Farshim, P. (2008, January 18\u201320). Certificateless signcryption. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security, Tokyo, Japan.","DOI":"10.1145\/1368310.1368364"},{"key":"ref_48","unstructured":"Selvi, S.S.D., Vivek, S.S., Shriram, J., Kalaivani, S., and Rangan, C.P. (2018, January 9\u201312). Identity based aggregate signcryption schemes. Proceedings of the International Conference on Cryptology in India, New Delhi, India."},{"key":"ref_49","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"452","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ins.2009.10.011","article-title":"Certificateless signcryption scheme in the standard model","volume":"180","author":"Liu","year":"2010","journal-title":"Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_50","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"661","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ins.2010.09.037","article-title":"Cryptanalysis of a certificateless signcryption scheme in the standard model","volume":"181","author":"Weng","year":"2011","journal-title":"Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_51","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"475","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ins.2011.11.045","article-title":"On security of a certificateless signcryption scheme","volume":"232","author":"Miao","year":"2013","journal-title":"Inf. Sci."},{"key":"ref_52","unstructured":"Freedman, R. (2017). Smartphone Recorded Driving Sensor Data: Indianapolis International Airport to Urbana, IL, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."},{"key":"ref_53","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1996","DOI":"10.1109\/COMST.2014.2320099","article-title":"Machine learning in wireless sensor networks: Algorithms, strategies, and applications","volume":"16","author":"Alsheikh","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor."},{"key":"ref_54","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"651","DOI":"10.1016\/j.patrec.2009.09.011","article-title":"Data clustering: 50 years beyond K-means","volume":"31","author":"Jain","year":"2010","journal-title":"Pattern Recognit. Lett."},{"key":"ref_55","unstructured":"Boneh, D., and Franklin, M. (2019, January 18\u201322). Identity-based encryption from the Weil pairing. Proceedings of the Annual International Cryptology Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, USA."},{"key":"ref_56","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Lu, H., and Xie, Q. (2011, January 9\u201311). An efficient certificateless aggregate signcryption scheme from pairings. Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Control (ICECC), Ningbo, China.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICECC.2011.6067635"},{"key":"ref_57","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wang, Y.-C., Hsieh, Y.-Y., and Tseng, Y.-C. (2008, January 11\u201314). Compression and storage schemes in a sensor network with spatial and temporal coding techniques. Proceedings of the VTC Spring 2008-IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Singapore.","DOI":"10.1109\/VETECS.2008.43"},{"key":"ref_58","unstructured":"(2019, October 15). Shodan. Available online: https:\/\/www.shodan.io\/search?query=mqtt."},{"key":"ref_59","unstructured":"Banks, A., and Gupta, R. (2019, May 24). MQTT Version 3.1.1. OASIS Standard. Available online: http:\/\/docs.oasis-open.org\/mqtt\/mqtt\/v3.1.1\/csprd02\/mqtt-v3.1.1-csprd02.html."},{"key":"ref_60","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Naik, N. (2017, January 11\u201313). Choice of effective messaging protocols for IoT systems: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and HTTP. Proceedings of the IEEE international systems engineering symposium (ISSE), Vienna, Austria.","DOI":"10.1109\/SysEng.2017.8088251"},{"key":"ref_61","first-page":"1234","article-title":"New explicit conditions of elliptic curve traces for FR-reduction","volume":"84","author":"Miyaji","year":"2001","journal-title":"IEICE Trans. Fundam. Electron. Commun. Comput. Sci."}],"container-title":["Sensors"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/20\/11\/3280\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T09:36:55Z","timestamp":1760175415000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/20\/11\/3280"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,9]]},"references-count":61,"journal-issue":{"issue":"11","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,6]]}},"alternative-id":["s20113280"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/s20113280","relation":{},"ISSN":["1424-8220"],"issn-type":[{"value":"1424-8220","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2020,6,9]]}}}