Biblio

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.

In recent years, the number of smart mobile devices has rapidly increased worldwide. This explosion of continuously connected mobile devices has resulted in an exponential growth in the number of publically available mobile Apps. To facilitate the selection of mobile Apps, from various available choices, the App distribution platforms typically rank/recommend Apps based on average star ratings, the number of downloads, and associated reviews - the external aspect of an App. However, these ranking schemes typically tend to ignore critical internal aspects (e.g., security vulnerabilities) of the Apps. Such an omission of internal aspects is certainly not desirable, especially when many of the users do not possess the necessary skills to evaluate the internal aspects and choose an App based on the default ranking scheme which uses the external aspect. In this paper, we build upon our earlier efforts by focusing specifically on the security-related internal aspect of an App and its combination with the external aspect computed from the user reviews by identifying security-related comments.We use this combination to rank-order similar Apps. We evaluate our approach on publicly available Apps from the Google PlayStore and compare our ranking with prevalent ranking techniques such as the average star ratings. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.