SecBCS: a secure and privacy-preserving blockchain-based crowdsourcing system

A robust and scalable crowd management infrastructure is crucial in addressing operational challenges when deploying high-density sensors and actuators in a smart city. While crowdsourcing is widely used in crowd management, conventional solutions, such as Upwork and Amazon Mechanical Turk, generally depend on a trusted third-party platform. There exist several potential security concerns (e.g., sensitive leakage, single point of failure and unfair judgment) in such a centralized paradigm. Hence, a recent trend in crowdsourcing is to leverage blockchain (a decentralized ledger technology) to address some of the existing limitations. A small number of blockchain-based crowdsourcing systems (BCSs) with incentive mechanisms have been proposed in the literature, but they are generally not designed with security in mind. Thus, we study the security and privacy requirements of a secure BCS and propose a concrete solution (i.e., SecBCS) with a prototype implementation based on JUICE.