FedCrow: Federated-Learning-Based Data Privacy Preservation in Crowd Sensing

In the process of completing large-scale and fine-grained sensing tasks for the new generation of crowd-sensing systems, the role of analysis, reasoning, and decision making based on artificial intelligence has become indispensable. Mobile crowd sensing, which is an open system reliant on the broad participation of mobile intelligent terminal devices in data sensing and computation, poses a significant risk of user privacy data leakage. To mitigate the data security threats that arise from malicious users in federated learning and the constraints of end devices in crowd-sensing applications, which are unsuitable for high computational overheads associated with traditional cryptographic security mechanisms, we propose FedCrow, which is a federated-learning-based approach for protecting crowd-sensing data that integrates federated learning with crowd sensing. FedCrow enables the training of artificial intelligence models on multiple user devices without the need to upload user data to a central server, thus mitigating the risk of crowd-sensing user data leakage. To address security vulnerabilities in the model data during the interaction process in federated learning, the system employs encryption methods suitable for crowd-sensing applications to ensure secure data transmission during the training process, thereby establishing a secure federated-learning framework for protecting crowd-sensing data. To combat potential malicious users in federated learning, a legitimate user identification method based on the user contribution level was designed using the gradient similarity principle. By filtering out malicious users, the system reduces the threat of attacks, thereby enhancing the system accuracy and security. Through various attack experiments, the system’s ability to defend against malicious user attacks was validated. The experimental results demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in countering common attacks in federated learning. Additionally, through comparative experiments, suitable encryption methods based on the size of the data in crowd-sensing applications were identified to effectively protect the data security during transmission.