  As a popular application, mobile crowd sensing systems aim at providing more
convenient service via the swarm intelligence. With the popularity of
sensor-embedded smart phones and intelligent wearable devices, mobile crowd
sensing is becoming an efficient way to obtain various types of sensing data
from individuals, which will make people's life more convenient. However,
mobile crowd sensing systems today are facing a critical challenge, namely the
privacy leakage of the sensitive information and valuable data, which can raise
grave concerns among the participants. To address this issue, we propose an
enhanced secure certificateless privacy-preserving verifiable data
authentication scheme for mobile crowd sensing, named EPDA. The proposed scheme
provides unconditional anonymous data authentication service for mobile crowd
sensing, by deploying an improved certificateless ring signature as the
cryptogram essential, in which the big sensing data should be signed by one of
legitimate members in a specific group and could be verified without exposing
the actual identity of the participant. The formal security proof demonstrates
that EPDA is secure against existential forgery under adaptive chosen message
and identity attacks in random oracle model. Finally, extensive simulations are
conducted. The results show that the proposed EPDA efficiently decreases
computational cost and time consumption in the sensing data authentication
process.
