Opportunity
In the era of big data and IoT, crowdsensing and crowdsourcing have become popular methods for collecting vast amounts of data from distributed devices for applications like medical diagnosis, smart transportation, and environmental monitoring. However, existing systems face significant challenges in ensuring data privacy, efficient real-time processing, and fair monetization of the derived knowledge. Current solutions often lack robust mechanisms to protect sensitive data from exposure during processing, especially when multiple cloud servers are involved. Additionally, there is no transparent and secure way to monetize the aggregated knowledge while ensuring contributors are fairly rewarded based on data quality. These gaps motivate the development of a system that can securely process encrypted data streams, perform real-time truth discovery, and facilitate blockchain-based knowledge monetization with quality-aware rewards.
Technology
This patent introduces an innovative framework that addresses the aforementioned challenges through a combination of lightweight cryptographic techniques and blockchain technology. The system involves multiple cloud computing servers that receive encrypted streaming data from client devices. Each client’s data is split into shares using additive secret sharing, ensuring privacy. The cloud servers then collaboratively perform streaming truth discovery in the ciphertext domain, updating the aggregated truth and client weights incrementally without decrypting the data. Key innovations include:
1. Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC): The use of multiplication triplets and garbled circuits enables secure arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication, division) and non-linear function approximations (e.g., logarithm) on encrypted data.
2. Streaming Truth Discovery: The system processes data in real-time, scanning each data stream once and integrating historical results with exponential weighted moving averages to maintain accuracy.
3. Blockchain Integration: The encrypted truth shares and client weights are committed to a blockchain, enabling transparent and fair knowledge monetization. Smart contracts automate payment and reward distribution, ensuring confidentiality and fairness.
Advantages
- Privacy Preservation: Client data remains encrypted throughout processing, preventing exposure to cloud servers or third parties.
- Real-Time Efficiency: Streaming truth discovery reduces computational overhead by processing data incrementally.
- Fair Monetization: Blockchain ensures transparent and automatic rewards for clients based on data quality.
- Scalability: The system supports multiple sensing tasks and clients, with performance validated on cloud and blockchain platforms.
- Security: Non-colluding cloud servers and cryptographic techniques (e.g., secret sharing, garbled circuits) protect against honest-but-curious adversaries.
Applications
- Healthcare: Secure aggregation of medical data for research while preserving patient privacy.
- Smart Cities: Real-time monitoring of air quality, traffic, or noise levels using crowdsensed data.
- Financial Markets: Transparent and fair knowledge markets for crowd-driven insights (e.g., stock predictions).
- Environmental Monitoring: Privacy-preserving collection and analysis of sensor data from distributed devices.
